My friends who know what a telephone phobe I am will surely guffaw at the sheer hypocrisy of my latest post at Harvard Business Online, an exercise in self-talk wherein I declare that a phone call beats out email in a lot of situations. In my defense, for the last month or so I’ve been working on a project that involved several super-productive calls per week, so I have been practicing what I preach (a little bit, anyway). Here’s the whole piece: Don’t Forget To Use the Phone.
One Comment
Severn Clay-Youman
Its funny, but this axiom has been coming up for me a lot lately – I used to believe that to get anything done you had to pick up the phone. Now? A lot of people are too busy to return phone calls. Emails, SMS and chat are able to “slip through the cracks” sometimes, when the there’s not much information to be conveyed (as in “still waiting for an answer – will let you know”).
I still believe the phone is the only way to get a decision made, short of meatspace.