Here’s the problem with writing emails, or other long texts, on mobile phones: Too. Many. Typos.
Except for the rare masters of touchscreen typing, typos are endemic to it.
And not just typos, but other sorts of mistakes, including:
- Awkward wording, because it’s much harder to go back and edit
- Writing more hastily, so your thoughts themselves are as thought out as they could be
- It’s much more likely to have a prissy tone that could be misinterpreted very easily by the other side
- Writing on your phone has the natural tendency to encourage extreme informality, so the medium affects the message
These lead to the conclusion that it’s often better to just avoid writing any non-trivial text on your phone completely.
Doing so has a few interesting and non-obvious advantages beyond far fewer typos. These include:
- If you’re on your phone, you’re more likely out and about, or at least not at your desk in work mode. So, if you read the message you received but don’t respond until you’re back in your workspace, then you have more time to mull over the issues and will likely have a better thought out response
- It makes it easier and more natural to separate “work time” from “non-work time” to avoid work expanding to accidentally take over your whole life. Note that it’s not necessarily bad for work to take over your whole life—a lot of excellence comes from a mission being all-consuming—but that needs to be a conscious choice on your part, not an accidental (or malicious) morphing of your work from certain, more-limited working-hours expectations to other, less-limited working-hour expectations. (Changing that can be great when it’s on purpose; just make sure it’s on purpose.)
Phone-based communication, however, does have a great work use case: coordination, especially when you’re out and about. Today it’s hard to tell a client that you’ll be 3 minutes late for a meeting if you don’t have a phone, for example. So that might be a quick email you send, on the go, while you’re stuck in traffic right near their office.
Rather, this suggestion is more important as the email or document in hand grows in importance. But in fact, even one-line emails can contain typos and can lead to badly misinterpreted messages and ensuing problems. Therefore, it’s often worth it to have a no-email-on-the-phone policy. Give it a try.
You’ll thank me when that leads to a better work-life balance for yourself! (Not the goal of this suggestion, but definitely an extra bonus of it.)
