The Jeff Pulver Blog: Trying to find the cure for: “Too Much Asynchronous Communication Syndrome”

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October 31, 2003

Trying to find the cure for: “Too Much Asynchronous Communication Syndrome”

During the work day, if you wish to contact someone, it is generally pretty easy these days to send just about anyone an email or try to leave them a message on their office voicemail. What exactly happens to that message once it is left is generally never known by the sender and in polite terms it becomes the burden of the recipient to deal with it, whether they want to or not.

While this is a basic assumption which one can generally assume, the reality is that when your message isn’t returned promptly, you never know if it was ever received at all. Does the person who you just left a message for screen their voicemails and/or emails and if you are not on their list of recognized senders do you not get a call back? Is it just the corporate culture not to return calls? Is it a quirk of the person you are trying to deal with? Does inbound communication to that office just fall into a black hole? Or what if the reality is that the person you just tried to contact gets swamped on a daily basis with too many calls that even if they wanted to call you back, they just couldn’t. This is something that you just would never know.

At least when you email someone, unless you get an immediate bounce, you feel as if the message was delivered. What you don’t know is whether that person gets 25-50 emails an hour and it will be days (or never) before you get a response back. When you leave a voicemail for someone you just expect the person to call you back, since that is the polite thing to do.

But finding the time to call everyone back is challenging at best and even when you want to, if you are spending most of the day in meetings, or are just being flat out busy, remembering to take the time to call someone back is hard. I used to think the best thing to do would be to write down the list of people who called you and call them back late at night and just leave a message. But with so many people working virtual these days that is a dangerous proposition for the times when you wake someone up who works from their home just because you tried to do the right thing and leave them a reply voicemail.

In my daily business life I’ve been dealing with these “open communication loops” for years. If you email me and don’t get an almost immediate response, if you are in the same time zone that I happen to be at the moment, and it is not the middle of the night, then try me again. With email I try to respond back the moment I read an email whenever I can. From what friends tell me, I’m getting better at it.

I don’t believe that “unified communications” is the immediate answer to the problem, mostly because many of the makers of “unified communication” software don’t generally know the exact problem they are trying to solve and end up assuming that their application will force others to change their evolving work habits rather than the other way around.

But I am convinced that this syndrome shows up in different forms to different people depending upon their own work habits and that like a virus, mutates into different forms as it moves from person to person. My hope is that one day a solution for those of us who suffer from too much asynchronous communication will be found.

I just find it ironic that after 3 days of being un-plugged, this is what is on my mind this morning. ;-)

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Posted by jeff on October 31, 2003 07:41 AM | Permalink

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