Face-to-face conversations happen in real time. They’re synchronous.

Same with phone calls, video conferences, meetings, and instant messaging. These media force us to react at the time the communication takes place, pulling our efforts and our attention away from anything else that we might otherwise be doing.

Email, on the other hand, is asynchronous. An email lands in our inbox, and it’s generally accepted that we’ll get to it when we get to it. There are certain conventions that we tend to follow, but it isn’t expected that a conversation over email takes place in real time. Voicemail, message boards, and sometimes text messages are treated similarly.

Historically, we tend to lean on synchronous forms of communication far too often.

A joint paper shouldn’t be written with all team members sitting in a room and coming up with sentences. It should be written independently, edited independently, and any non-obvious questions should be captured for review. Any synchronous communication during this process should be very quick and/or in small groups.

The challenge is that the path of least resistance is to default to synchronous communication. When we can’t find the discipline to think through a problem, we call others and waste their time while we think out loud. When we fail to control our calendar, we schedule a meeting to force ourselves to work at a certain time (and in the process hold all other participants unnecessarily hostage.) When we are unwilling to take a stance, we default to questions rather than recommendations and force others to come up with answers.

Synchronous communication is core to who we are as humans. It’s personal, and it’s necessary in many situations.

But in situations in which we have work to do, the generous thing to do is to handle our work on our own time and look to our collaborators to do the same.

-Brandon