Actually I would argue that people send texts despite it often being highly inefficient. It often takes an infuriating amount of text messages to agree on something that would only take a 2min call. It's just we're so used to sending chats.
Chat has other advantages. Lets say you're trying to agree on a restaurant for dinner:
- If I'm busy right now I don't need to stop what I'm doing to answer the call, or you don't need to try again later.
- Need 2 minutes to look up your schedule and suggest a time or find a restaurant? That's fine, I can do something else until you reply and you don't feel like you need to rush the process.
- 6 hours later I forgot which restaurant we agreed on? It's ok, just open the chat, it's right there.
- The chat is searchable, if 2 months later I don't remember the restaurant name I can probably find in a few seconds by searching some related keywords like "food", "restaurant", "dinner", etc.
This depends on the people involved. I find most of my programmer friends prefer text in most circumstances, but most people in sales, marketing, accounting, HR and management that I've worked with tend to prefer voice, video, face to face. As do people in other industries (eg my mother loves voice and video and while she does use text a lot, mostly to talk to me, often finds it tedious).
This is why my default is text until a call becomes obviously better. "Where do you want to go for dinner?" ten messages of hemming and hawing, "Call me when you're free". A call forces an interruption on the person, or a game of phone tag. Texting can be answered when each person is able, and can be used to coordinate the call.
