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).
> your environment often does not honor the effort you put into the writing
There's an art to communicating in a way that makes people want to read/listen. I've found the most effective way to do this in the work setting is keep it as concise as possible + put the most interesting/relevant takeaways at the top of everything I write
If you explain things in terms of what is most relevant for others you'll get much more engagement
What I wanted to say: Effective writing (with the goal to reduce the meeting & realtime communication noise) is an investment you might decide to take. But it depends not only on you if that strategy bears fruits, but also on your environment. If your working environment is not susceptible to that style of async communication and does not honor it, then you will fail to achieve your goal; no matter how good your writing style is, everyone else will still drag you into these time-consuming meetings you wanted to avoid.
What you need to achieve is not only a change in the style of your own communication, but a change in the style your team and organization communicates. You are running a very subtle change project. And it takes a lot of time and can even fail, when you decide to drop it, because your approach will never succeed in this organization.
This is the aspect I am missing in the original posting: It's not only you, you need to get the buy-in and support of your organization to make it really work.
Yeah, I could see it being harder if people refuse and prefer to meet anyway.
I do think the individual can have decent influence though. I often cancel meetings and message people to take things offline if it’s not a good use of eng time.
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).
> your environment often does not honor the effort you put into the writing
There's an art to communicating in a way that makes people want to read/listen. I've found the most effective way to do this in the work setting is keep it as concise as possible + put the most interesting/relevant takeaways at the top of everything I write
If you explain things in terms of what is most relevant for others you'll get much more engagement
What I wanted to say: Effective writing (with the goal to reduce the meeting & realtime communication noise) is an investment you might decide to take. But it depends not only on you if that strategy bears fruits, but also on your environment. If your working environment is not susceptible to that style of async communication and does not honor it, then you will fail to achieve your goal; no matter how good your writing style is, everyone else will still drag you into these time-consuming meetings you wanted to avoid.
What you need to achieve is not only a change in the style of your own communication, but a change in the style your team and organization communicates. You are running a very subtle change project. And it takes a lot of time and can even fail, when you decide to drop it, because your approach will never succeed in this organization.
This is the aspect I am missing in the original posting: It's not only you, you need to get the buy-in and support of your organization to make it really work.
Yeah, I could see it being harder if people refuse and prefer to meet anyway.
I do think the individual can have decent influence though. I often cancel meetings and message people to take things offline if it’s not a good use of eng time.