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More often than not, I get messages like this:
Mark: Hey! …4 hours later… Me: ??????? Mark: I have a few questions. Up for a quick call? Me: Hmm… what's the question? Mark: So, my client’s kid forgot their lunchbox. I was wondering if we have any protocols for that. Me: Yep, that’s actually a common issue. There’s a Confluence page with all the details. I wrote it, in fact, because you've asked me this same question multiple times over the last five years. Mark: Whoa, easy there. You know I decide your yearly salary hike, right? Me: Haha, just kidding! I know you’ve got a lot going on.
This short exchange contains almost every communication failure that a software team can make: a naked ping, a synchronous interruption on an async tool, a documentation system nobody uses, a call as a first resort and a power dynamic deployed to shut down the critique.
The Naked Ping
"hey", "got a sec?", "quick call?"
These are naked pings: messages that announce intent without carrying any actual information. They force the recipient into a holding pattern. You cannot answer a question that has not been asked, so you just wait or wave back. And the round-trip multiplies: by the time you reply "what's up?", they may have stepped away, and now you are both waiting on each other instead of moving the actual problem forward.
The fix is trivially simple: include the question in the first message, nohello.net says it better than I can.
Async vs. Sync Communication
"Up for a quick call" treats Slack like a phone. It is not one.
Every tool sits somewhere on a spectrum: ephemeral to permanent, synchronous to async. Reaching for the wrong one produces worse outcomes, not just mild annoyance. The failure mode is defaulting to "quick call" because it feels faster. It rarely is. You trade five minutes of your time for twenty of someone else's, and nothing is written down once it is over.
Documentation and Searchability
If I had a penny for every time I heard "we don't have enough docs", I would be a thousandaire. Most teams have plenty of documents now, especially with AI making them way easier than ever to write. The problem is almost never a lack of docs. It is discoverability and trust.
In Mark's case the document plainly exists. I wrote it myself, the one about "missing lunchboxes". Either he does not know where to look, or he does not trust it enough to bother. Both are undesirable in a workplace. A document nobody can find may as well not exist, and a document that was wrong once loses its reader permanently.
It is Never a Quick Call
Mark has a problem. I am in the middle of something else. He sends "quick call?", and I context-switch, find a slot, join, answer, hang up, then spend another ten minutes finding my place again. A two-sentence Confluence lookup just cost us forty minutes between us.
The research is unkind here. A UC Irvine study found it takes over 25 minutes to return to a task after an interruption, and an interruption of just 2.8 seconds is enough to double your error rate. Multiply that across a team of twelve and "just a quick sync" turns into a real line item.
Before scheduling a call, ask whether it could be a message. Before sending a message, ask whether it could be an existing doc.
The Power Dynamics Trap
Now, Mark dangling my salary over a lunchbox question is an exaggeration. But dial it down to something believable and the problem is very real. It is easy to push back when a junior sends a naked ping. It is a great deal harder when it is a senior director, even when they never threaten you with your salary at all.
Hierarchy has a way of short-circuiting good communication norms. The people most likely to send context-free messages are often the ones with the most authority to do so (no data, just anecdotes). If the culture has not been set from the top, you are fighting a losing battle.
Question with Context
A well-formed question is a skill. It carries what you are trying to do, what you have already tried, the relevant context (errors, links, ticket numbers), and how urgent it actually is.
Compare Mark's "Hey, up for a quick call?" with: "A client's kid forgot their lunchbox. I checked the parent handbook but couldn't find anything, do we have a protocol for this? Not urgent, sometime today is fine."
Same problem. One gets an answer. The other might turn into a calendar invite.
When a Call is Actually Right
None of this means calls are bad. Some things genuinely do not survive text. Emotionally complex conversations can lose too much in translation. Real-time debugging, or ambiguous requirements that would take thirty messages, can collapse into five minutes of good old talking.
The idea is simple: would writing this down produce a worse outcome, or just a less comfortable one? If the answer is the latter, write it down.
The Whole Thing in One Habit
None of this is complicated. Most of it collapses into setting up a good practice.
- Slack / Teams : quick, ephemeral, time-sensitive
- Docs (Confluence, Notion, Github Repo) : persistent, searchable
- A call : last resort, not first instinct
Lead with a question, not the "hey". Write things down where people can find them. Treat someone else's time as the expensive resource it is. And if you hold a senior position, do all this loudly, because the team follows you whether you intend it or not.