Choosing How To Communicate
by Miki SaxonI had an interesting experience today—actually, I found it amusing, but ridiculous.
I used to live in Silicon Valley, the land of early adopters and the technically obsessed, and am still involved with several groups there.
Here’s the short version of what happened.
- Around noon one of the project members sent an email to all of us saying he urgently needed certain information and asked if ‘Joe’ had it;
- Joe replied around 1 that he didn’t have it, but maybe a Jean did;
- Jean replied around 1:45 that only Mary had access to it.
I saw the thread around 2:15 when I got back to my office, called Mary and told her that she urgently needed to respond to the thread.
She did and the situation was dealt with immediately.
What was so ridiculous is that the entire group knows that
1) Mary is the only person with access to this info;
2) That she is ‘technologically challenged’; and that
3) she doesn’t read email as it arrives; she checks it on and off when she has the time.
That means that email wasn’t the best choice to contact her and everybody knew—if they had stopped to think about it instead of running on autopilot.
There are many ways to contact people these days, email, instant messaging, Twitter, but only if you don’t care that the world can see it, Facebook, ditto, etc.
The problem lies in focus; your choice should depend not on your preference, but on the preference of the person you are trying to reach.
So remember, communicating is like playing golf. The trick isn’t to play the whole course with one club, but to know which club to use for which shot.
Image credit: ks on sxc.hu
July 24th, 2009 at 10:20 am
I’ve long been a believer of this. From the time that email first became available I had a mental note of who would read it, i.e. how to best contact someone quickly.
I myself do not listen to voicemails, but read emails as soon as they come in.