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'Only Voice Memos Can Save Us From the Scourge of Email' (qz.com)
Emails are great -- so much so that many believe that it's one of the best inventions of all time. But when you get hundreds of emails everyday, things could get harder to handle. Understandably, many have resorted to alternatives such as Slack, Gchat, and other IM services to offload many of the things they previously did exclusively via emails. An article on Quartz today argues that perhaps voice notes is the best alternative to emails. From their article: There's a solution staring us right in the face: a technological tool that preserves the intimacy of the human voice without requiring people to sync up their schedules. As a number of remote workers, diaspora communities and expats have already discovered, voice notes might just be the answer we've been waiting for. Barcelona-based filmmaker Philippa Young, for example, relies on WhatsApp's voice notes to communicate with her nomadic yet tight-knit team of 15. She sends audio notes throughout the day that range from just a few seconds in length to 10 minutes. The system allows her far-flung coworkers to respond whenever the sun rises in their time zone or they manage to find a stable wifi connection. [...] Voice notes also offer an antidote to one of the primary anxieties of the digital era "the fear that emails, texts and instant messaging rob conversation of emotional nuance, leading to endless misunderstandings and social blunders. "The thing that I really value about it for our team spread out across the world is that when I get a voice note from someone, they've spoken to me and I hear their tone of voice," Young adds. "You can hear in someone's voice how they're feeling."
Trying to decide if I'd ignore all her voice mails because I don't have time to listen to everything she said and can't scan for important things, or I'd ignore her voice mails because clearly she is full of bad ideas.
Probably both. If anyone sent me an email that took 10 minutes to read, I would ignore it after glancing.
I'll keep my "intimacy" for my personal partners and not my work colleagues.
Heck, emails are often too long. That's why most of us communicate by text. I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
I HATE....
Voicemails!!!
What takes 10 minutes to say in voicemail can probably be read in 1 or so, and more easily referred back to.
My employer started doing video documentation instead of written documentation for in-house tools and classes and it's extremely irritating - it's a population of very well educated people who are used to reading large volumes of technical information for detail and digesting it, so they started distributing information in the lowest bandwidth, least random-access way they could think of.
Or, heaven forbid, use voice mail/answering machines that have been around for decades. I routinely ignore my phone when I'm busy, and everyone who knows me knows that they can immediately call a second time if it's important to talk to me right now. As for everyone else - if they can't be bothered to wait through my (very brief) answering message to leave a message, then it's a safe bet that whatever they had to say wasn't actually important enough for me to waste time listening to. As an added bonus, most people don't like talking to machines, and will impart the relevant information in a fraction of the time it would take to extract it from them in a conversation.
Still, for some things it would be nice to be able to conveniently bypass the phone call entirely and jump straight to voice mail - there are times the intimacy and subtlety of voice are preferable, but that doesn't mean I want to interrupt your flow, nor waste a bunch of time on irrelevant conversational pleasantries.
Best case I think would be auto-dictation with voice attachment, so that you could send a voicemail, with all the convenience of recording such, and have it automatically (and accurately) converted to text so that it can be read in a fraction of the time, with the original recording available to listen to as well, if *you* judge that the subtlety or intimacy are important.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I mean, the only reason I would want to get the "emotion" behind a message is if I find myself unable to comprehend the written word and instead of facts try to "solve" things in an "emotional" way. But even then this is stupid, because to get a reasonable estimation for how somebody feels, you have to be in the same room and talk face-to-face to them.
My take is that this is a protest from people that failed to master the art of the written word. It may be a good idea to disregard any advice they give.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.