Phone calls are rude. They demand your immediate attention with a loud alarm and no regard for where you might be or what you are doing. Texts/email are respectful. They make a small chime just to let you know they are around, then wait patiently for you to read and respond.
Which is great when people use a phone call in situations where an immediate response is warranted -- not so great when I realize I've had the device occupying one of my hands and my attention for 10 minutes, and the speaker has yet to make a point
There are certain people who when I see calling, I just won't pick up. On the other hand, when the phone rang at 4am and it was my brother, I knew something terrible had happened. If he had been a frequent caller/offender, I'd have silenced and ignored the call, but I'm really thankful that I picked up. It's like a "boy who cried wolf" situation.
Why not just mute the phone while you're not interested in being contacted synchronously, and rejecting calls when you don't have the ability to talk synchronously?
Wild take to be honest, it's essentially the equivalent of saying that in-person conversations are rude and that people should send you a physical letter instead.
Because some things warrant my immediate attention, and most don't. I am never interested in being contacted synchronously unless it's something actually urgent. And because of that I can tell people that if they need me, they can call me and if I'm at all able I will answer immediately, otherwise I will probably answer later, aka whenever I happen to see it.
Yeah, it's not like we have complex social rituals, informal rules and elaborate signs and calls designed to establish the appropriateness of in-person interactions. I just punch anyone in the face that I don't want to talk to me, that usually gets the message across. And if I want someone's attention I just scream my demands at the top of my lungs an inch away from their face. If they don't punch my face I assume they are fine with the conversation.
My dentist has started texting about appointment reminders and reschedules. It's an automated system but also a person can manually jump into the conversation. I love it because it means I don't have to talk to them on the phone.
I give the phone call or text option at my work, and I don't believe I have a single client who prefers a phone call, which is great because, yeah same
Basically our entire healthcare system has had that for years. We can't reschedule with SMS though. Sometimes clinics support rescheduling via the national E healthcare service, though.
Personally, this kind of thing is part of how I control the phone rather than have the phone control me, all of which reduces stress and even increases productivity at a professional level.
An SMS or similar kind of message always gets stored, and I can check it when its convenient for me.
Phone calls only get stored if the other side actually records a voice mail, so there is pressure to pick up a phone call immediatelly, "just in case they don't leave a voicemail" which might very well be interrupting work on a complex task that shouldn't be interrupted.
Yeah, I also use that to further segregate things by level of importance: there's lots of unimportant stuff coming in via that channel, so if a person on the other side can't be arsed to leave a voicemail, it's not important enough.
The SMS option just allows further segregation of important-non-urgent from important-urgent: for me an SMS might have something I should know or is good to know (say, confirmation of a doctor's appointment) but have plenty of time to deal with (say, it's in 2 weeks) so it works well for automated messages (plus it's faster to read and SMS message tend to be a lot shorter and to the point than voicemail)
In the old days of WFH I would further segregate it by "if it's really really urgent come to my desk" which further filters for importance based on the effort others are willing to put on it by coming to me with it.
In my professionally life I've concluded that a lot of unecessary stress comes from unimportant, important-urgent and important-non-urgent all coming in via the same channels and me having to treat everything as "possibly important and urgent" when most of it is no such thing, hence my filtering by-effort-required, which is not perfect but works way better than most people's approach to it.