WhyIrefusecallsWhy I refuse calls

The contact form has a line, in lowercase: brief preferred. People sometimes read it as a stylistic choice. It is the most operational sentence on the site.

The request lands, in some variation — could we hop on a quick call to discuss the project? The reply is the same: no, but I’d be glad to read what you’re working on. Some stop writing back. Most don’t. The ones who don’t are the work this practice is for.

The position is more deliberate than it sounds. I want to put it down in writing.

A call is not the opposite of writing. It is a different operation, with different costs.

A thirty-minute call sounds light — until you account for the half-hour of context switching that bookends it, the calendar negotiation that precedes it, the after-action notes that try to recover what was said, and the residue it leaves on the rest of the day. Rarely thirty minutes of work. Rarely thirty minutes of decisions. Most often: thirty minutes of presence, and a separate hour spent trying to remember what the presence produced.

Writing forces what calls allow you to defer. It forces a sentence to settle. It forces the half-formed thought either to clarify or to drop. A founder who writes a paragraph about her brand has, by the time she presses send, made decisions she didn’t know she had to make. She has chosen one verb over another. She has put a position into language. She has begun the strategic work in advance — and the work I do begins from a better starting point because of it.

Calls invert that. The thinking happens out loud, often for the first time, with two people improvising under social pressure. Decisions get made because someone has to break the silence. Then both parties try to write down, after the fact, what the silence produced.

I’d rather start where the writing has already been done.

The next objection is fair. But what about getting to know each other? Aren’t calls how trust gets built?

I don’t think they are. Trust gets built by doing the work well over time. The first email a client sends, and the first reply I send back, contain more reliable information about whether we are going to work well together than any video call would. The temperature of the writing tells me everything I need: how a founder describes her own company, what she refuses, what she’s frustrated by, how patient she is, how clearly she thinks. None of that is hidden. It’s all on the page, if the page exists.

An engagement has begun with a founder I never met, and finished with the work in production and the relationship intact. The work was the relationship.

I have also had calls, in earlier years, that produced warmth and very little else. The project that followed bore no trace of the warmth, and every trace of the early ambiguity the call had failed to resolve.

Warmth is not the same as alignment. A call is good at the first; writing is better at the second. I choose alignment.

There is a second-order effect that took longer to understand. Async work — work that lives in writing, in shared documents, in slow exchanges — is not just kinder to the schedule. It is kinder to the project.

Every call adds a layer of memory I have to maintain. What did we agree about the type system? Did she say she wanted the wordmark in lowercase, or did I assume that? Without writing, the project becomes a parallel reconstruction of two people’s notes. With writing, the project has a single source of truth I can return to two weeks later and recover exactly. The brand book I deliver at the end of an engagement is not a separate artefact — it is the conversation we have already had, organised.

This matters more for some kinds of work than for others. Identity work, in particular, accumulates. A decision made in week one shows up in week eight, in the way a label is set or a colour is chosen. If it was made in writing, it is recoverable. If it was made on a call, it is, half the time, gone — replaced by what one of us thought was agreed to.

Async is not slower. It is more honest about what was actually decided.

People sometimes ask whether I’m available for a call, with the implication that the right circumstance might unlock it. The truthful answer is that the position is structural, not personal.

The studio is one person. The hours I have are the only hours the studio has. If I gave half of them to calls, the other half would be spent recovering the thinking the calls had displaced. The work I am proud of has happened in long, undisturbed stretches — in the morning, before the first message of the day, or late, after the inbox closes. Those stretches are where the typography settles. They are where strategy moves from a draft to a position.

Calls erode them in advance, by colonising the calendar, and after the fact, by occupying the part of the mind that should have been on the work.

A practice that does its best work in silence cannot afford to spend its days speaking.

If you are reading this and considering writing, here is what helps. A few paragraphs about the company, in your own voice. What you stand for. What you refuse. Who you are for. What you are stuck on, in plain terms. A link to whatever exists, even if it is partial. A sense of the timing.

That is enough to begin. It is, in fact, more than enough. The reply you get back will contain more decisions than a call would have produced, and the work that follows will inherit the clarity rather than have to manufacture it.

A practice that talks less, writes more. Not because it is easier — it isn’t. Because what gets written can be returned to.

And the work I sign my name to depends on what can be returned to.