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by kijin 1979 days ago
Although synchronous conversation is often desirable, there are different ways to initiate it.

IMO it's more polite to use an async channel first to ask if the other party is available for a phone call, and if not, schedule a phone call for a specific time. Like, I'd love to talk with you about that problem this afternoon, but right now I'm too busy debugging another problem.

1 comments

Worth noting that the linked site advocates against this:

> × "Hello, are you around?"

> × "hi sophie - quick question."

> × "You got a sec?"

I agree with you around scheduling synchronous communications, but the thread itself seems to have devolved into a puristic argument against all sync comms regardless of urgency, ephemerality, confidentiality, etc.

"you got a sec?" and "you got a sec to talk about X?" are worlds apart. whether I have "a sec" can quite reasonably depend on what X is.