Why Voice Notes Suck

I hate voice notes. iMessage has this terrible feature where you can click and hold to send an audio recording. People use it as a way to hide. 

You see, when you start recording a voice note, you don’t need to have all your thoughts together. You can just start talking, and put your thoughts together on the fly. It’s quicker for the sender to just hit record, start rambling, and let it fly. But it’s way more time-intensive for the listener. The listener has to find a quiet place, hit play for the 60-120 seconds of the incoherent ramble, and try to make actionable sense of it all.

And the worst part? They disappear two minutes after you listen to them. So not only are you unable to reference them if you forget something, you also can’t play them back for the sender to show them how incoherent they are. People rarely send incoherent ramblings over email, because that could be used against them. (Sure, you can choose to save them, but then you’re the guy who saves audio messages to play them back. And they take up space on your phone!) 

Voice notes gives the illusion that things are happening, and decisions are being made. But if decisions really were being made, they could be wrapped up in a concrete, concise email. People use voice notes to hide from the decisions that must be made. 

Now I’m the one who’s rambling…

P.S. If you want to stop rambling on your productions, I just launched a Producing Guide called How To Produce A Video Shoot (without pulling out your hair). It’s a 15,000-word guide that teaches you everything you need to know about producing digital content. It’s live now, and it would mean the world to me if you checked it out.