I think your multitier "How and When It's Okay To Talk To Me" document only seems like a good way to interact with others if you ignore that they are also people with preferences and time constraints, and that communication is _between_ two people, not just _to_ you. If you take those things into account, you start to sound like a person who thinks others should tailor their actions to your whims, and thinks other people are the assholes when they don't follow your unspoken rules.
Async communication by txt not only avoids interruptions to what Im currently doing (often difficult programming / analysis tasks) but also. with txt there's not the expectation of immediate answers like there is with voice. With txt I can reference material (code, results, calendar) and or think deeper about a response, consider angles and second order effects and THEN respond. This leads to much deeper conversations and more well thought out execution.
I see a call as rude generally, because what its saying is "Stop what you are doing, give me all of your attention and talk to me about my topic right now, and answer me right now" and 99.99999% of the time, nothing is that urgent
I have the same preference you do, but I recognize that efficiency is not the sole purpose of a conversation. Asynchronous text conversation lacks a direct interactivity that many people value, and it is often useful even when the topic isn't time-sensitive. For example, this conversation wasn't pressing, but imagine how much more smoothly it would have run if we were talking while waiting for a meeting to start. You get that interactivity from a call; you don't get it in text messages.
Your argument is that the conversation would have gone more smoothly had it been direct, but there's no way I would have been able to enumerate my position clearly without having a minute or two to think about it above, type it out, make it clear again, and then explain all my points of view.
So it's likely a direct conversation would have NOT been as smooth, because I wouldn't have been able to state my thoughts clearly all at once, trying to satisfy the immediate responses that direct, realtime voice calls require.
I have also found that by not taking immediate calls then I dont get those annoying, reactionary type phone calls of people asking me things they:
- Could have thought of themselves had they stayed inside their own head for a moment
- Could easily type into google and get a faster answer
- Stopped getting calls from those people that fill their calendars and days with pointless busy-work, convinced that they are productive because of the noise they generate.
- My friends can type basically as fast as they talk, so there's not really a speed issue, the only person that still voice calls me is my grandmother, because she's too blind to see the mini keyboard
By that same reasoning, you should probably avoid talking to people in person, too. Maybe you should carry around a copy of Krick's statement, shush people who try to talk to you, and give them a copy.
If you think that sounds rude and bad, maybe reconsider your approach to conversation when it's not face-to-face — because that's how it comes off to a fair slice of the population.
