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November 16, 2007
Still looking for the cure for: “Too Much Asynchronous Communication Syndrome”
Back on October 31, 2003 I wrote the following:
“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 sent 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? Was it blocked by a spam filter? Is it just the corporate culture not to return calls? Is it a quirk of the person you are trying to deal with? Does all 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 presents itself in different forms to different people depending upon people’s 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.”
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I rediscovered this blog post after reflecting back on one of the threads discussed yesterday at a meeting I attended at Union Square Ventures.
During the four years since I first wrote about this, my issues with too much asynchronous communication have gotten worse, not better. I understand that there now are outlook plug-ins which are helping solve the email loop issues. Or at least provide some feedback on how we approach email.
As the number of my daily email messages have continued to grow, I have more or less stopped listening to voicemail (but unlike some friends, I am not currently using SimulScribe. I just don’t listen.). And to add to my personal scaling issues, RSS, SMS and Facebook messages have entered my daily mix of communication methods.
However, when I look ahead to the future, I have reason to believe it will be thanks to the evolution of social media / social communications that some of us will be presented with a workable solution to the growing problem of suffering from “too much asynchronous communication” in our lives.
I would like to believe it will be my social media living room which will provide an easier way to personally prioritize the importance of incoming communications based on relationships and past experiences with the sender and where that person is ranked inside of my social circle (at that moment) and other related metadata, rather than whether just if the subject of a message is marked “urgent.”
What about YOU? Do you ever suffer from “too much asynchronous communication?” What do YOU do about this today?
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Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Facebook.
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Tags: SimulScribe, email, facebook, Social Communications, Social Media, Social Media Living Room, Phil Hollows, Matt Blumberg, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Tom Evslin, Jeff Pulver
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Posted by jeff on November 16, 2007 08:29 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Don't remember where I heard this tip, and it's not ground breaking, but I have updated my outgoing message at GrandCentral.com to request the caller to leave an email address instead of their phone number. I have their number. It was captured from caller-id.
Posted by: 中港租車 at March 31, 2008 12:40 AM
i do not know if how many people have tried to turn off the voicemail on a cell phone in the last couple of years. i have; and they do not make it easy. for some reason with just abnout all the operators. you can call customer service and they will happily tell you that they just turned off the voicemail. in almost every case(verizon, at&t, sprint, all of them) they end sending all your incoming calls after 5 rings to some broken mailbox.
i like my voicemail off for the reason you talk about. but it is quite akward to have callers sent to some voicebox error prompt. plus they have to pay for that call if it is long distance(or iut uses their cell minutes) anyways after about two weeks of repeated calls to customer service it is finnally off correct. i do not know if it is intentional(all those missed calls and calls to voicemail add up in minutes) but the CS people are definatly not trained in turning off the voicemail boxes.
that said about my frustrations I would very much appreciate if persons who choose not to return voicemail would choose to turn off the voicemail function on there phones.
Posted by: tom at November 19, 2007 01:34 AM
yo jeff been so busy writing and talking to myself i didn't get a chance to read your blog or for that matter my blog - and on top of that our email server that we share and your own private spam-icide has this strange glitch that i think filters out anything that comes from pulver.com - so go figure when you can't even write yourself an email and it gets lost we are in trouble - talking about asynchronous - when you can't even talk with yourself too - boo hoo boo hoo what's this world coming too :-)
g-oh
Posted by: geo geller at November 18, 2007 11:56 PM
One thing I use on my mobile is Spinvox which translates voice to text so I don't have to play back messages and can receive them quietly during meetings.
Posted by: Niamh Kiernan at November 16, 2007 03:46 PM
amen to that. Which is why I love Twitter, you can get Facebook notifications in, IM, sms etc. It really ties communications together, n'est pas?
Posted by: Derek at November 16, 2007 02:28 PM
I think managing my asynchronous communication depends on three focal factors
(1) The people who communicate to me.
(2) What I'm doing at the moment.
(3) Where I am at (If I'm at my office/home - in other words at a fixed location OR mobile - moving with a short attention span)
Its based on those three that I try to manage my async comm. What I'd like is a way for me as an initiator and receiver of asynchronous communication to be automagically aware and take advantage of all three of those focal points without a completely behavior altering "unified communications" package (in a way, the unification through a social network type map is is the best any unified communication platform could depend on for now)
I guess its almost like I'm trying to synchronize the asynchronous because I can only consciously (humanly) process items in a synchronous manner.
All this talk now reminds me of an article I read this am in the WSJ (http://tinyurl.com/256pns) on are we extending our human limits using social networking apps.
Posted by: Jomy Pidiath at November 16, 2007 02:24 PM
Don't remember where I heard this tip, and it's not ground breaking, but I have updated my outgoing message at GrandCentral.com to request the caller to leave an email address instead of their phone number. I have their number. It was captured from caller-id.
Sad to say it hasn't been that much of a time-save. Most people use their same ways of communication in spite of me trying to update mine.
Person A will call. I'll email back. Person A then calls back to respond to my email. ?!
Posted by: Jeff at November 16, 2007 12:06 PM