Excellent, thanks!

Hi Derek (and others)
Nice post, overall.
I am reminded of how the Japanese give longer answers than we do when asked a question in person. For example, they might start with an orienting sentence, "our school is very old" Sometimes our natural milage varies.

Back in the days of telephones, it was second nature to me to ask someone I already knew, a little into the call, "Have you got time to talk?" This applies to your last two bullet points. To me the obvious answer to courteously agree to call another time.

Another old memory, from the Readers Digest: The devil appeared on the Larry King show. When asked his most devilish invention, he said, "Call waiting."

I would never use call waiting, for the same reason I close my eyes on the phone, and try to be a good listener in person, and the same reason I would never take my cell phone to a concert: I believe in the here and now, one experience at a time. (I have never watched a performer through a tiny screen)

Part of the problem was the callee forgetting to tell the caller, that there was a second person already on the line.—it felt awful to suddenly be told you were taking too long, and why.

As for e-mail, I would discriminate between busy working world e-mail...
and real world: If I go to the trouble of finding my virtual quill and ink bottle and stationary, then I am going to write for a while. (Note: If you write to your congressman, I think real paper gets more respect)

(Given that I blog for people at their leisure, not hunching guilty at work) I amused myself, for my blog essay last week, (about blogs) by explicitly building in two places where I told my readers it was OK to go get a tea and come back, maybe tomorrow. (Why not? I'm not getting paid)

This is like another layer of the five love languages. Some people prefer time over gifts, picnics over fancy dinners.

And here I thought that if my emails were the length of symphonies the person on the other end would realize that I built them a Rolls Royce instead of a Toyota.

Thank you for the reminder that some people prefer the stripped back version.

Great information here. I would add that asking people up front the best way to communicate with them is extremely helpful as it shows that you are mindful enough to ask. And another thing I do when I need to speak to someone on the phone, is send a text or an email that says, Can I take up X minutes of your time to talk about X? I love when people do that to me and I respond to them faster because it allows me to figure out how and when to plug them into my schedule. When people text me or email and say "Call Me" with no frame of reference, I always wait until I know that my schedule will be more open, which ultimately ends up getting pushed to the bottom of the list of things to do.

I think this is another "meet people where they are" moment. "Put yourself in their shoes" and write from their position. Some of us are arrogant enough to believe what we have to say is more important than someone else's time, focus and energy, and we ramble on. Guilty. Some of us need to be treated like a child who could use a big spanking.

More feedback:

What I can now put my finger on is that your piece goes from exploring various way communications do not "sync up" ... and then on to "how to be concise." You join these two topics in one rushed sentence, using a one syllable "but."

You could make the but stand out by using eclipses, or by breaking the sentence in two, or something else. As it stands, your first half of the sentence, "There's a huge benefit..." is somehow diminished by the but, as is the first half of the piece.

That's my opinion, but I'm sticking to it. (An opinion that reads better if you replace but with and)

I will keep it short
there's no need to ramble on
stream of consciousness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

Here's what I recently realized: People have blurred the line between letters and memorandums.

I can remember when memos came on forms with carbon paper to make a copy or two; I remember when office doors had a wooden triangle memo holder on the outside; you may recall from the first Paddington movie how bigger offices used pneumatic tubes to send inter office memos. (People also used an electronic interoffice communicator, "intercom" for short)

And of course memos would have a subject line. Meanwhile, letters between corporations, on paper, still had a dear Sean, and the subject would be a sentence, "Regarding the marketing of widgets..."

But here's the thing: When we went digital, e-mail changed from being electronic mail to being electronic memorandums, even between corporations, not just between in-house offices. That's why we don't use a subject sentence or say dear Sean.

It's too bad. Something's lost. It's like how the invention of the telephone, replacing the laborious harnessing of horses, led doctors to stop making house calls (too many frivolous phone requests) Digital has made it too easy to communicate, for any little short frivolous subject, by folks who would normally be too lazy to write and mail a letter.

Last week I messed up. I sent a guy warm fuzzy positive feedback on his daring to blog post a photograph of his goals grease calendar, with his daily failures in coloured felt pen. I compared and contrasted to my own goal setting, which I too track daily.

My problem? I had one line, and one line only, about a new film release (Tree of Life on Criterion) of a show he liked, AND my subject line was about that.
So he probably thought, "Good to know the release" and deleted it. Or something. He knows me well enough to have otherwise replied

Email no longer has a hyphen (e-mail) and no longer means mail. Memo forms and mail forms do not mix. Now I know.

Hi Derek...

I have written a song

https://youtu.be/TjcvFdbzsGo

I have no likes on youtube the radio station camglen I gave it to wont play it yet the kids round here are waving and acting crazy when they see me.

CD baby say I dont exist

I cant log in

I'm doing my best to do considerate communication but I am coming to the end of my tether.

Can you help please. I know u started cd baby to help struggling artists and I really appreciated that u took the time to travel the world to meet your artists. I was at the talk u gave in the thirteenth note pub in glasgow all these years ago but Ecotisticle (thehappysacks) my album hasn't even played for the setup costs yet....well at 0.01 cents per stream I suppose I should have known better.

Anyway I hope you are keeping well

Watch out for the Ho Ho's ;)_~

Peace n ease of being

Neil Glen (thehappysacks)

Update: The guy I mentioned two posts up did mail me back, talking of the movie and the local weather to compare with mine. (We are on the same continent) So hurray. I don't think there was anything to say about his goals post.

Sometimes, patience is a virtue.

Speaking of memos, just before society went digital, some of the folks with nerve would informally reply in pen on the same memo they had received and send it back—less formal, but more efficient. Not meaning to be rude. So we are not the first to have informal memos with our own emails not having formal salutations and sight offs.