Ask HN: How do you stop people from trying to call you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you stop people from trying to call you?

5 pointsstfu5 comments

I just hate it when people are trying to lure me into giving them a call or skype'ing them. Has anyone figured out a way on how to avoid that?

My friends and family are already conditioned to text me in one way or another. But how do you guys do it with people in the typical "calling" age (i.e.30+). For example I am currently sending out PhD proposals and am getting quite frequently from potential advisors a response along a "looks interesting, call me" variation.

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Having launched a company with no voice conversations with developers, everything strictly over skype chat, can empathize. Voice conversations can be time consuming and not properly indexed for future use like email and chat typically is.

That being said, it's a tough challenge to want to change other people. Some strategy I typically go with:

If I feel that the person can digest it and you am in drivers seat (ie. lawyers, vendors) I typically say: "if you think it's necessary we can jump on a phone call but don't want to waste time here, and am looking for your thoughts on x,y,z"

If it's someone that I am wanting something from and they are a high profile individual will go with:

"I know you are extremely busy and last thing I want to do is take to much of it, what I was simply hoping for was a,b,c..."

Some people though, will never be able to break out of voice conversations and if you really want to work with them you will need to sacrifice.

And in some situations voice will bring you additional results you never thought of and will be happy you did so.

Great to hear that one can have success without that evil telephone thingy! These are some great suggestions for reframing the situation. Thank you very much and I will most certainly reuse them :)

If it's the situation that someone needs something from you, I think you're within your rights to limit the "conversation" to whatever medium you're most comfortable with (e.g. I myself prefer e-mail for most communications). But if it's a situation where you need something from them (e.g. sponsorship from a potential PhD advisor) you may have to just suck it up and place the call.

You don't mention why you're averse to phone calls. If talking on the phone (especially with strangers) makes you anxious, maybe it would help to write down notes in advance about potential topics of conversation, and have those in front of you before you make the call.

I never became comfortable talking to people without getting a visual perspective. Whenever I write something, I can put some effort in constructing a narrative and reworking it until I am somewhat okay with it. But I find it incredibly hard to "wing" a conversation without getting any visual feedback. It is less of an issue in these situation where I don't care about the outcomes or if it is just some repetitive thing. But creating a first impression via telephone is just something that I find extremely unsettling.

I understand. Best of luck.

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