I have a love-hate relationship with telephones. On the one hand, it is an invaluable tool to allow person-to person instantaneous communication to catch up or to really allow explanation or deep communication and understanding about an issue or a happening, especially when email is too clunky or time consuming. On the other hand, phone are a way for others to demand immediate attention, regardless of my schedule.
I start each work day with my "to-do" list and mentally map out when and how I'm going to accomplish the tasks before me. Once I get started on a task it might be an hour before I look up again to check my email and see how my day is being reshaped by client and co-worker demands. But, when I do look up to check my email, it's on my own time, at a natural break point when I'm not in the middle of a train of thought, about to make a breakthrough on an issue, or frantically working to meet a deadline. If I receive an urgent email, I can assess it and address it without interrupting my other project mid-thought, and for less-urgent emails, I can take five seconds to respond to the email with my anticipating time for tackling the issue. This allows me to be the master of my own schedule and to access, prioritize my tasks based on my understanding of everything that needs to be done and the competing deadlines, and communicate my timeline to those affected, rather than letting one person jump the line in front of tasks that have a higher priority or for which someone had the foresight to reserve time on my calendar.
There are times when a 45 minute or longer telephone conversation legitimately needs to occur "RIGHT NOW" and there is no time to schedule it or plan for it. But, if someone needs 45 minutes of my time, most of the time, it wouldn't be too difficult to schedule a time to talk about it (even if it is just later than day), rather than just call me and expect that I have time to drop everything and squeeze an extra 45 minutes into my day. People don't expect that they can just walk into their dentist or doctor's office, or even their pedicurists office without notice and be served immediately so I'm not sure why they think other professionals should be different. I also think that people often miss that the beauty of scheduling a time for a phone call is that I can be mentally prepared and in a mental state to devote the appropriate thought to the call instead of a mental frenzy worried about how the call is interfering with other demands and deadlines.
On the personal side, scheduling a chit-chat phone call isn't routinely done, and I get that. But if I'm the caller, I typically start out the call with "I'm just calling to check in and catch up, do you have a few minutes to talk, or are you in the middle of something?" I feel like this gives the other person the opportunity to gracefully decline a conversation instead of just jumping in and assuming that because the phone was answered, the answeree has all the time in the world. The nice thing about personal calls is that I feel less compelled to rearrange my schedule to chat and will often ignore calls if the timing is inconvenient. But, I have occasionally been caught answering an inconvenient non-urgent call from a family member if the call comes at an unusual time (like after 9 p.m. or during the middle of a work day) and I answered it concerned that an emergency might have occurred.
I guess until I can convince the world that a telephone is meant to be a convenient device for both the caller and the receiver, I'll be stuck sighing aloud when my phone rings and attempting to keep my phone from running my life, but, of course, not leaving home without it.
No comments:
Post a Comment