Be Brave Not Safe

In a prior post I shared thoughts on the “Art of Miscommunication“ focusing on the misuse of text and email, and followed up with the first, of two posts, on the “Art of Good E-Communication.” The goal: encourage “us” to make best use of these very effective tools to avoid miscommunication, embarrassing situations and present ourselves as courteous and professional contributors to society (a.k.a., position ourselves to EARN MORE $!).

Now, for texting

I’ve found texting to be very effective in sharing short bursts of information or asking a quick question, which would hopefully result in a short / immediate response. Good examples include:

• To my wife: “@ Walmart, need anything?”
• To my colleague: “Con call started, RU joining?”
• To my kids: “Will UB home 4 supper?”

I’m sure some are LOL (laughing out loud) as they could further collapse these verbose messages into far fewer characters. But, so far, I haven’t gotten into trouble texting 🙂

In my opinion, texting is NOT a method to carry-on meaningful conversations. And, it doesn’t (yet?) offer a way to “manage” information (past conversations, important facts, follow-up actions, etc.) for future reference (next week, month or year) the way email does.

Bottom-line: If there is a need or desire for “meaningful conversation” (Can I get more hours at work next week? Why were my hours cut? Why aren’t you responding to my texts?) it is time to get on the phone or meet face-to-face. If we take this approach, and only use text for what “truly” requires an immediate response to an important question, we are much more likely to actually get that necessary response. If, on the other hand, our phones are constantly alerting us to a bunch of ongoing “chat streams” it becomes pure “noise.” We then become numb to it and don’t respond promptly to those truly “important” texts.

By the way, the above becomes increasingly important with the introduction of “wearable” devices. Have a look at the Apple Watch, announced earlier this week. AMAZING! As you can imagine, these devices (and I plan on having one, once available) have small screens. I anticipate (but certainly don’t know for sure) that these screens will be conducive to reading short texts, but “may” not be so, for long / verbose text conversations and/or emails. That said, I could be wrong: I often am 🙂

REMINDER: I share the above for those who wish to present themselves as highly competent, courteous, even professional contributors to society. If you don’t care about these objectives you’ve probably already stopped reading this post 🙂