Efficient Communication
👋 Hi, this is Ryan with this week’s newsletter. I write about software engineering, big tech/startups and career growth. Thank you for your readership, we hit 33,000 readers this week 🙏 🎉
This week, I’m writing about efficient communication and how it can cut down on meetings. If you find the post helpful, please share it with your friends and coworkers. Enjoy!
It’s not controversial to say that meetings hurt productivity for software engineers. That’s because meetings cost engineers more.
Async communication via writing is one of the best ways to reduce meeting load, yet still efficiently exchange information. This can help us defragment our calendars.
There are a few reasons why writing is more efficient than speaking in engineering organizations.
Higher Baud Rate
Reading is faster than listening. A quick Google search shows that on average, people read around 2x faster than they can listen. This efficiency gap is even more pronounced when you consider skimming.
People don’t need to read every word to understand the full message; they can skip unnecessary words and read just the important ones.
Easier To Reference
Technical content often takes more than one pass to understand. You’re bound to miss critical details if you’re listening to a presentation. However, written material is easy to reread for anything you might have missed.
Not to mention that writing is searchable, which is a huge bonus for when you want to look back on the content down the road.
Preparation Drives Higher Quality
In my experience, putting work into writing yields a higher quality end result than prepping for a speech does.
My guess on why this happens for most engineers is because there’s a lot more you need to nail to give a high-quality speech. It’s not just what you say but how you say it (e.g. vocal variety, pacing, avoiding filler).
With writing, you only need to consider the words. Because of that, time spent on editing goes a lot further than speech prep does.
Given the above, it’s clear that writing is often more efficient than speaking is. Here are some recommendations:
Opt for Written Information Exchange - Postmortems, design discussions, and planning exercises can all be more efficient with writing. Exchange information through write-ups and schedule shortened real-time discussions if needed.
Consider Taking Meetings Offline - Some meetings don’t need any real-time discussion (e.g. status meetings). Propose canceling those in favor of async writing.
Use Writing Templates - Don’t start with a blank slate when you write. Try these software engineering templates to save time and structure your thoughts.
Speaking has its place though. It’s better for real-time engagement, sensitive discussion, and building connectedness. Otherwise, I’d recommend writing if you want to be a more effective engineer.
Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman
Writing as a form of async communication (and not as a format to deliver working results, as you would do in a thesis or other assignments in school and academia) is something engineers often learn only at a job, assuming that their working environment has a strong tendency to do so.
Outside of that it is very hard to learn and stick to it, because your environment often does not honor the effort you put into the writing, instead they call you back (although you will actually read to them in the call what you have written. In that case you wasted your time with writing (not exactly because writing often helps you get your thoughts straight, but it still can feel this way).