The Value of Face to Face

Why am I flying to Germany for the second strait month? Why am I interrupting my running schedule, my routine, losing all this sleep, to talk to a bunch of people I email every three days?

Well, it is far more effective. Seriously, I could fly here, go to half a day of meetings, and fly home, and it would be a better value of my engineering time than two and a half days of work.

Sure, there is significant value to emails, phone calls, text messages and the like, but seeing the person face to face, we can take as long as we want to discuss face to face. We can go into the details of the issue, draw pictures, take a 10 minute break, drink more coffee, and figure out a solution better, by seeing the person sit across the table from us than we can over the phone. There is definitely value to phone calls and emails and text messages, but sometimes nothing substitutes for the real person. The message is the same, but how you say it in person seems to vary less than how you say it over writing or the phone.