Tell People How to Reach You

You probably split your channels into roughly three buckets without thinking about it. There's the slow stuff—email, maybe LinkedIn messages—where you check in once a day or less. There's the fast stuff—texts, WhatsApp—where you expect to respond within minutes or hours. And there's the live stuff—calls, video chats—where you're locked in until the conversation ends.

The issue is that other people are using the exact same tools with completely different expectations. Your friend thinks WhatsApp is for real-time back-and-forth. You treat it like email with emoji reactions. Neither of you is wrong, but one of you is getting silently frustrated.

I've been on both sides of this. I've texted someone at midnight assuming their phone was on silent—it wasn't. I've sent what I thought was a casual email and gotten an anxious follow-up because the person expected a same-day reply. I've sat in messaging threads getting increasingly annoyed that someone kept disappearing mid-conversation, only to realize they were treating the chat as a leisurely exchange while I was waiting at my screen like it was a phone call.

The simplest solution is to just write it down. Something like:

Put it in your email signature, your bio, your personal site—wherever people first look when they want to reach you. It takes five minutes to write and saves dozens of small misunderstandings over time.

There's a subtler benefit too. Documenting your communication habits forces you to actually decide what they are. Most people haven't consciously chosen when they check email or how quickly they respond to texts—they just react to whatever buzzes at them. Writing it down turns a set of unconscious habits into a deliberate routine you can actually improve.