I'd say the solution is to attack those problems directly.
There are some things that just work poorly asynchronously. I find heavy-duty explanations of something, where you need the highly-interactive back-and-forth is necessary, and honestly, even just trying to type something is wasting minutes vs. saying it, is a common use case for me. Getting 4 half-distracted managers who are lobbing emails at each other into a quick conference to resolve the matter is sometimes a really good idea, too, because the "lobbing emails at each other" is a political minefield. A lot of potential for hurt feelings and miscommunication that can be avoided just getting everyone in live voice chat, with their full attention, for even just 5 minutes sometimes.
I probably do more cross-team stuff than the average dev, but in anything beyond a trivially-sized organization, managers are doing it all the time.
> But people don't, so you get messages like:
So what you're saying is that you don't actually mind the 15 minutes of real-time chat, what you mind is that some people don't know how to effectively communicate.
1. A concise, realistic agenda is distributed to all attendees beforehand, and actually followed 2. A single person takes concise notes, with a heavy focus on action items and official decisions; the notes are distributed promptly at the end of the meeting (or better yet, real-time via a shared document) 3. Each action item is given a single assignee and realistic deadline
Your chat example seems like it could be solved with a 5-minute screenshare.
Although it's almost worse when they send along a JPEG screenshot that has been downsampled >50%, so all the details are too blurred to make out.
It's especially frustrating when you're dealing with timezone shifts that make the average time to get a round-trip email reply from the other person take a dozen hours or more
[says they're typing, work on something while I wait]
[6 minute pause]
"Are you there?"
"Yes"
"I'm getting an error when using [tool]"
"What's the error?"
[2 vague barely related lines in a long error message or traceback]
"Could you show me the full error message and the command you tried to run, please?"
By the time the full troubleshooting process is over (which usually amounts to "follow the instructions in the error message"), I've lost track of whatever I was doing and wasted who knows how much time.
Truly asynchronous communication would force them to put their whole thought down on paper at once and perhaps organize it better, or at least allow you to skim. But then of course, async is poor for time sensitive issues anyway.
She once thought she had "lost" her entire spreadsheet because she scrolled too far down to a blank section of the spreadsheet.
I always hated "15 minutes of real-time conversation", not because of being an introvert or anything, but because it's fuzzy, nobody remembers what it was exactly said, and usually ends up with people wasting each others time (like Diltert-style meetings).
I'd much rather people knew how to communicate effectively on chat.
But people don't, so you get messages like:
"The service is broken!"
"[panicked] What do you mean? Is it down?"
"It doesn't show anything"
[still panicked] Really? Let me see... Hmm, I see it working properly, loaded the first page and everything. What do you see?"
"I don't see anything"
"[???] On the first page? On some specific panel? Have you entered something?"
"Entered? I clicked and got nothing"
... and after 20 more minutes you realize they are on the third tab of a particular page, which nobody ever uses, have entered some search term people seldom enter, and got no results there, and everything else is working fine...