The Pain of Keeping in tOUCH

I am a believer that our association with friends is something that should exist organically. There should never be any formality in friendship. It should not be forced and the relationship should flow naturally.

The definition of friendship may vary from one individual to another but I have broken this down into 4 characteristics defining the relationship. A friend is a person that:

1. You trust
2. You are comfortable around
3. You share common interests, values and goals in life
4. You communicate with frequently and synchronously on a meaningful basis

There a two words in this definition that we need to be cognizant of: synchronous and meaningful.

Synchronous means communication that exists and occurs at the same time. Synchronous establishes presence and real-time. By meaningful, I mean that the communication is relevant, valid, and significant and makes the time you are spending to communicate with this individual worthwhile.

The major challenge these days is that meaningful communication has become convoluted with the introduction of technologies that are intended to foster asynchronous (non-real time) communications but psychologically assume synchronous responses.

E-mail, Twitter, Whats App, SMS mobile texting are some examples of technologies that have been introduced into the consumer market as tools to assist the communication of messages to and from each other, but are misconstruing the concept of providing adequate and timely responses.

When we communicate with friends via phone or face-to-face synchronous mediums (i.e. Skype, FaceTime, at the local bar, etc.) we can pose a question and immediately get a response. The issue with tools that are generally asynchronous (not at the same time) is that the response time can vary from immediate to a few minutes – to a few days – to even a few years.

What’s “Appening” these days is that we have created a communication society leveraging asynchronous technologies with the expectation they will drive synchronous responses – which is completely not possible all the time.

I believe we need to create a new paradigm in how these tools need to be used. I have created a table below with some rules to help you out with direction on what kind of behavior I think you can display in personal and business situations using asynchronous tools. Feel free to use this with a grain of salt.

Tool	Personal	Business
E-mail	Keep response brief and to the point – a couple of lines should do it. It is not necessary to be formal and address by name – just write the response. Pick up the phone for more in-depth discussion. Respond at your earliest. If it is urgent the sender will call.	Respond at your earliest but at least within 4 business hours; if an email comes in on a Friday afternoon at 3 PM, you have till 10 AM on Monday to respond. Be professional in the email starting with “Mr./Mrs.” or “Dear So-and-so” or “Hi (first name)….” where necessary.
Mobile Texting	Respond at your earliest. If it is urgent they will call you. For chit-chat – what did you think – what’s up type of communication don’t bother with detailed responses; just use a whole slew of SMS shorterners (e.g., k, c u l8r, ttyl, etc.) where necessary; try to meet up face-to-face for a drink or coffee or talk over the phone. It’s better to wait a few weeks to meet up socially than waste your time in back-forth discussions not leading to meeting up. For deep open-ended what is the meaning of life – why was your mood off yesterday – what’s bothering you – type discussions save your time from texting and just pick up the phone and talk. Save personal texting for binary or close ended communication limiting the need for the recipient to respond (i.e., please pick up groceries, on the way home, there in 2 minutes, etc.).	For business related matters, tell clients you prefer email so you can track the communication. For business clients you are texting for personal reasons, follow the rules to the left under personal. For colleagues you are working with, respond immediately if someone needs access to a building or you want to meet up for lunch to talk business; for work related matters tell them to email you at your business  email account for tracking purposes.
Mass Messaging (i.e., Tweet)	Keep brief and to the point; the good thing is that tweeting is limited anyways.	Suggest sticking to email for business communication.

Remember the goal of communicating in friendship is to use text or email to facilitate meeting up in person or talking on the phone. Don’t use too much text and email to engage in conversation and discussion. In some cases this may be necessary for long distance relationships.

Face the reality that friendships will go through their ebbs and flows as well. If you are texting way too much than meeting up that could be an indicator that there may be a wall between you and your friend and you may each be communicating for the sake of communicating because neither of you really want to meet up.

Don’t force the expectation that the party on the other side needs to communicate with you via text or email – it really is up to them how and when they want to respond. It’s an act of courtesy for them to respond as soon as possible but you can’t force a response in the long run.

In my opinion, the role of technical tools should be to foster non-face-to-face communication as a medium for quick communication rather than a tool for deep social dialog. The issue many of us fall into is that we don’t know how to use texting, emailing and tweeting. We ask open-ended questions and make comments using these tools that probe more dialogue offline rather than direct communication on-line at the same time.

There could be a whole slew of reasons why some friends may not respond to you in a timely manner, but it could very likely be that there is really nothing much to talk about – which is ok and completely reasonable. Let your friendship be natural and when the time comes to talk, you will talk.