“You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.” —Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Be careful not to think of interactions with others as items to be checked off a list so you can move on to the next task. This mindset is one of the primary reasons we default to communicating through email or text. Ironically, most of us agree that text-based communication is ineffective—yet we continue to rely on it.
In computer communications, there is a concept called error concealment (sometimes referred to as error compensation). When part of a message is missing or corrupted, the system attempts to guess or reconstruct the missing data so processing can continue. Sometimes, the system gets it wrong.
The same thing happens in text-based conversations. Important conversational data is often missing—signals of misunderstanding, tone, emotional context, or even full recall of the conversation when there are long gaps between messages. As a result, the receiver is forced to fill in the gaps, and those assumptions are not always correct.
Have you ever had to repeat yourself, overexplain a point in an email, or exchange far too many back-and-forth messages just to get a simple idea across?
The rate of information transfer is significantly higher in a real conversation than in text. In other words, text-based communication strips away critical data—and misunderstandings are the natural consequence.