Day 348: Communicating Better
I’ve been thinking about what focus I’d like to set going into 2021, and one direction stands out: becoming a better communicator.
There are multiple facets of what that means to me:
- Communicating better in my relationships
- Communicating better in my work
- Communicating better in my writing
Relationships
Since I keep Do Not Disturb enabled 24/7 and try to check my phone as infrequently as possible, my responses to messages can be quite slow (relative to our modern expectations of always-on instantaneous communication). This isn’t a problem, but sometimes, I tell myself that I want to respond to something later and then I forget about it. As a result, I end up not responding for weeks or even months. I’m not happy with that outcome because I don’t want messages from people to go completely ignored. While this has mostly been a problem with random emails that people have sent me after coming across my work, it sometimes happens to friends as well.
I’d like to make sure that I don’t completely drop messages and have some sort of personal SLA for the messages I receive. Right now, I’m thinking of making it 24 hours on typical days. That is, I’ll check all my messages in one go once a day and make sure I answer all the messages that I’ve received in the past 24 hours. That feels like a good balance between not having to check my messages all the time and making sure that I respond to people in a somewhat timely manner. I think I’ll need to come up with a system to help me with this because when messages stack up, it starts to feel overwhelming because there’s so much to deal with.
Work
Along similar lines, I’ve had an extremely difficult time dealing with feedback for the products I’ve built. I probably get about 5 messages a day from people about Intention, and it’s gotten to the point where I don’t look at the messages on most days because it feels like there’s so much to deal with. But this defeats the whole point of collecting feedback because I end up missing extremely important bugs like Amplitude breaking sites when included in Intention — I only found out about this because someone tagged me on GitHub, and I later found out that the person who filed the issue had filled out an Intention bug report weeks prior to that. I would’ve been able to catch that a lot more quickly if I had a proper triaging process in place.
Whenever someone takes the time to send in their feedback about Intention, I want to at least acknowledge that I’ve read it and that it’ll be taken into consideration, even if I don’t end up implementing their feature request or making changes that they’ve requested. Right now, even when I do read it, there isn’t an easy way to respond because I have to copy over all the information from Google Sheets into Gmail which takes a while (fun fact: this was the original motivation behind Browserflow) so people get radio silence and probably think their feedback goes into a black hole. As a result, they’re probably less likely to provide feedback in the future or report bugs.
The solution here would be to improve my tooling and make it easy to respond to people. I love the customer support system that Jeremy Ho of Eloquent built, and I’ll probably try to replicate that so that I can simply reply to an email to respond to feedback.
Writing
This year, I wrote a ton in Road to Ramen (as I wrote this sentence, I realized I could use Browserflow to do a word count of all the posts I’ve written so I’ll compile some fun stats for my end-of-year review), but it ended up serving a different purpose than what I originally intended it for. R2R was intended to share things I’ve learned (writing for others to benefit), but it just became my personal journal that I happen to publish online (writing for myself).
I’m considering putting more effort into writing for others in 2021 so that I can work on becoming a better communicator. These journal entries don’t really help me improve on the craft of writing and communicating my ideas since they’re mostly records of whatever stream of thought I happen to have in the moment rather than structured and complete pieces of work.
I’d probably do a post a week so that I can take my time polishing those pieces. Not sure if I’ll be able to do both the weekly posts and daily journal entries, but I’d like to try because journaling every day has been great for helping me think out loud and create a record of my journey.