Stop Sending Me Homework

Why your “quick” voice memo is stealing everyone else’s time

A voice memo showed up on my phone the other day. Three minutes and twelve seconds long. I hadn’t even hit play yet and I already resented it a little.

Because here’s the thing about a voice memo — it’s a way of outsourcing the work you didn’t want to do onto whoever has to listen to it.

Write something down and you’ve already done the hard part. You’ve figured out what matters, thrown out what doesn’t, and put it in an order that makes sense. It might take you three minutes to write. It takes me fifteen seconds to read. That’s a fair trade.

Hit record instead, and none of that happens. You start with the backstory, wander toward the actual point somewhere around minute two, remember something you forgot, and tack on “oh, one more thing” right before you hang up. I’m stuck with no way to skim, no way to jump ahead, no way to do anything but sit there and wait for you to get to the point.

Your convenience just became my problem.

The Ninety-Second Lie

People tell me it’s just faster to talk than to type. And they’re right — for them. Talking is faster because they’ve moved the work downstream. They save ninety seconds recording. I lose three minutes decoding. Send that same memo to five people and you’ve saved yourself ninety seconds and burned fifteen collective minutes of other people’s lives.

Mark Cuban put his finger on the other half of this. He doesn’t do calls anymore, and his reason isn’t etiquette — it’s memory. “If we do it by phone, I’m going to forget half the stuff that we talked about,” he said. “If we do it via email, I can search for it, always.” Talk evaporates. What you write down stays put.

Communication was never supposed to make life easier for the sender — it’s supposed to make the message useful to the receiver. Optimize for your own speed instead of their clarity and you’re not communicating. You’re broadcasting.

Garbage-Bag Communication

A few months ago I launched a mentoring platform call Wisen that - for now - is built entirely around writing — no calls, no video, nothing but text, back and forth. I did that on purpose. Writing forces a kind of discipline talking never does. You can’t ramble your way through a memo the way you can through a phone call. You have to know what you’re trying to say before you say it.

Jeff Bezos figured this out at Amazon long before anyone was turning it into a framework. He banned PowerPoint from executive meetings and made everyone write six-page memos instead — real prose, no bullet points. Then he’d open the meeting by making the whole room sit in silence for the first thirty minutes and read the thing cover to cover before a single person spoke. He called it the smartest thing Amazon ever did. Writing one honestly is so much harder than talking about it — most bad ideas don’t survive the page.

Good communication works like good packaging. Ship something in a sturdy box with clear instructions and I can open it and use it in seconds. Stuff those same parts into a garbage bag and hand it to me, and now I’ve got a project instead of a product — even though, technically, everything’s in there.

Most “quick” memos are garbage-bag communication. And every time you send one, you’re quietly telling the person on the other end that your minutes are worth more than theirs. You probably don’t mean it that way. It lands that way anyway.

One Question Before You Hit Send

Are you making this easy for them, or just easy for you? Could that email be skimmed in ten seconds? Does that meeting really need thirty minutes, or would a tight paragraph do the job?

None of this means never use your voice. Tone matters sometimes. You’re driving sometimes. You’re brainstorming with someone who signed up for the ramble. I grant that there are lot of reasons you need to speak instead of write. Fine. Even then, you can respect the other person’s time — lead with a one-line summary, keep it structured, and close with the actual point instead of burying it. “Leaning toward option B, September launch, smaller scope” tells me everything I need to know before I’ve spent thirty seconds listening for it.

Good communication looks a lot like a good rewrite: say what you mean, cut what doesn’t matter, move the important part to the top, tell people exactly what you need from them. It feels slower than hitting record. It isn’t. You just moved the work to before you hit send — where it belongs.