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On Written Communication

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I've been noodling on this topic for a while, and I realized as I was walking home earlier today that it clicked for me.

One of the things that I've been finding myself really missing as of late at work is a platform for communication that encourages longer form written content. Slack, our defacto default communication tool, has simultaneously been one of the best things and the worst things for team communication and collaboration. It's difficult for me to accurately describe my mixed emotions about it in writing.

[1]Jump to footnote

I think I've partially started to really feel this since I've been diving deep into tools for thought like Obsidian and Roam, which have really encouraged me to think by writing. I've found it incredibly freeing to brain dump my thoughts on a topic, and it has helped me make connections that I might have otherwise lost to random thoughts before getting distracted by something else.

However, I don't really have an equivalent for communication, or more specifically I feel like I'm missing the Obsidian vault that I could use to collaborate with think with teammates[2]Jump to footnote. While internally at work we do have tools like Google Docs, Confluence, etc, none of these tools seemed to have really stuck, and they either lean too heavily into one side of the spectrum between collaboration or permanence.

I don't know if I necessarily have a point or takeaway with this blog post, however I do think there is value in defaulting to longer form communication. It does have trade offs, usually in both more investment for writing and reading, however it can also shorten an otherwise lengthy discussion of back and forth slack messages into a single concise read.

Footnotes:

👆Back to reference I do however really enjoy being able to create and use emoji that are entirely custom!

👆Back to reference I'd be really curious to test this out at some point, or even to hear from folks that have tried a similar setup to see how it's worked or not worked!

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CollaborationCommunicationWriting