A few weeks ago, my office phone rang. It rarely does, and even when it does ring, I rarely answer it. I usually let the call go to voicemail. My outgoing voicemail actually says: “I never check voicemail, please email me at…“. And even if someone does leave a voicemail, it’s transcribed by the university email systems and sent to my email.

This is so inefficient, and self-sabotaging, given that I, like most academics, moan about how much email I have to process.

But this time, noticing that it was another professor in my department who was calling, I picked it up. My colleague who was calling is the co-ordinator for the Psychology Honours program and he had a simple question about the project that one of my undergraduate Honours students was working on. We solved the issue in about 45 seconds.

If I had followed my standard protocol, he would have left a voicemail or emailed me (or both). It would have probably taken me a day to respond, and the email would have taken 5-8 minutes for me to write. He’d have then replied (a day later), and if my email was not clear, there might have been another email. Picking up the phone saved each of us time and effort and allowed my student’s proposed project to proceed.

Phone Aversion

Why are we so averse to using the phone?

I understand why in principal: it’s intrusive, it takes you out of what you were doing (answering email, probably), and you have to switch tasks.  The act of having to disengage from what you are doing and manage a call is a cognitively-demanding action.  After the call, you then have to switch back. So it’s natural to make a prospective judgement to avoid taking the call.

And from the perspective of the caller, you might call and not get an answer, then you have to engage a new decision-making process: Should I leave a message, call again, or just email. This cognitive switching takes time and effort. And of course, as many of us resent being interrupted by a call, we may also assume that the person we are calling also resents the interruption and so we avoid calling out of politeness (maybe this more of a Canadian thing…)

So there are legitimate, cognitive and social/cognitive reasons to avoid using the phone.

We Should Make and Take More Calls

My experience was a small revelation, though. Mostly because after the call, while I was switching back to what I had been doing prior, I thought about how much longer (days) the standard email approach would have taken. So I decided that, going forward, that I’m going to try to make and take more calls. It can be a personal experiment.

I tried this approach a few days ago with some non-university contacts (for the youth sports league I help to manage). We saved time and effort. Yes, it might have taken a few minutes out of each other’s day, but it paled in comparison to what an email-based approach would have taken.

For Further Study

Although I’m running a “personal experiment” on phone call efficiency, I’d kind of like to study this in more detail. Perhaps design a series of experiments in which two (or more) people are given a complex problem to solve and we can manipulate how much time they can spend on email vs time on the phone. We’d track things like cognitive interference. I’m not exactly sure how to do this, but I’d like to look at it more systematically. The key things would be how effectively people solve the problems, and if and how one mode of communication interferes with other tasks.

Final Thoughts

Do you prefer email or a phone call? Have you ever solved a problem faster on the phone vs email? Have you ever found the reverse to be true?

Or do you prefer messaging (Slack, Google Chat, etc.) which is more dynamic than email but not as intrusive as a phone call?