Which is great when people use a phone call in situations where an immediate response is warranted -- not so great when I realize I've had the device occupying one of my hands and my attention for 10 minutes, and the speaker has yet to make a point

There are certain people who when I see calling, I just won't pick up. On the other hand, when the phone rang at 4am and it was my brother, I knew something terrible had happened. If he had been a frequent caller/offender, I'd have silenced and ignored the call, but I'm really thankful that I picked up. It's like a "boy who cried wolf" situation.

I’m not saying I wouldn't. I’d just give him a “⚠️” look.

Meanwhile I'm an introvert and I would rather a 10 minute phone call than an email chain back and forward.

If it's going to be more than 2 emails, call me.

Writing an email is just as socially draining for me - sometimes even more so if I don't know you well and I'm over thinking the tone or how much context to include. Having to send more than 2 emails is just elongating the interaction, especially if the other person is in and out of the office so they don't reply quickly and I keep having to come back to the same conversation and shift my headspace in and out of "socially mode"

Of course, being in and out of the office is a big reason why email is great, you get to it when you get to it and no one is entitled to your immediate attention.

My philosophy is: I don't leave voicemails and I also don't listen to voicemails.

I text first and call later in most cases. If it's important call me twice

Yeah, I also use that to further segregate things by level of importance: there's lots of unimportant stuff coming in via that channel, so if a person on the other side can't be arsed to leave a voicemail, it's not important enough.

The SMS option just allows further segregation of important-non-urgent from important-urgent: for me an SMS might have something I should know or is good to know (say, confirmation of a doctor's appointment) but have plenty of time to deal with (say, it's in 2 weeks) so it works well for automated messages (plus it's faster to read and SMS message tend to be a lot shorter and to the point than voicemail)

In the old days of WFH I would further segregate it by "if it's really really urgent come to my desk" which further filters for importance based on the effort others are willing to put on it by coming to me with it.

In my professionally life I've concluded that a lot of unecessary stress comes from unimportant, important-urgent and important-non-urgent all coming in via the same channels and me having to treat everything as "possibly important and urgent" when most of it is no such thing, hence my filtering by-effort-required, which is not perfect but works way better than most people's approach to it.