I was in the middle of a hot negotiation.

Both of us felt we were making inexorable progress toward a mutually satisfactory deal, but I caught a cold.

So, instead of communicating by phone, I decided to carry on our discussions via email, admittedly a less interactive medium, but one that has definite strengths.

I simply made this shift by announcing at the beginning of an email, that Id be relying on it for the next few days instead of the phone.

I thought email would be serviceable because it can disguise the state of your health at the moment, whether its a froggy throat, sniffles, or the sort of general sloth or weakness that I loath to show at any time, but especially during negotiations.

But even more significant, in good health or bad, email can slow the tempo, make each message more deliberate and thoughtful, and of course, get things reduced to writing that might otherwise become mere ephemera, and in a legal sense, unusable or relatively worthless later on, should there be a dispute about what one party, or both promised.

In this case, my counterpart expressed surprise that there wouldnt be phone contact, but nonetheless he persevered and gave me answers to most of my questions.

But he declined to comment on the most important query, one dealing with money, and this tipped me off that he was trying to nuance, to fudge, to embroider, instead of biting the bullet and committing to ante up hard dollars and cents.

On at least an unconscious level, I suspected he was not in with both feet, that his overall commitment to a fair deal was absent.

In a word, there wasnt a deal, and there wasnt going to be one, and a quick exchange of emails confirmed this fact.

Im a subscriber to the notion that a bad deal is far worse than none, because a bad one, sooner or later will be undone; it must be, and that can be messy, costly, and its almost always distracting.

So, when youre negotiating, use the media that will serve your purposes, and when it is in your interest to shift, from face to face to the phone, or from the phone to email, dont hesitate to act.