Here;s my hierarchy—from best to worst—for the efficient transfer of information between two people who don’t know each other well:
Face-to-face conversation (Best!).
Phone conversation.
↓
Email.
↓
Text messaging (Worst!).
The gaps I placed above between phone/email and email/text messaging are not an accident.
Email and text messaging are usually an inefficient and an inadequate means of communicating any information requiring nuance, and often require multiple open-ended back-and-forth communication over hours, often with an open-ended time commitment. That is, you don’t know when the other person is going to get back to you, and you therefore don’t have a a sense of when the interaction is over.
Often a 3-minute phone call is a much better way to go.