“Thinking Faster”:http://workingsmarter.typepad.com/, a blog I follow semi-regularly (it’s in my newsreader, I don’t read it as often as I should but I read over the homepage worth of posts and they’re all excellent at the moment! Stuff to get you thinking, can’t say whether I agree with it all but food for thought is normally good), has an interesting post called “Tools of the Trade“:http://workingsmarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/02/tools_of_the_tr.html that mentions two people he knew, one that exclusively used email for communication, the other the phone.
I found it interesting, because I’m much more comfortable with email than a phone conversation. I dislike the phone and voicemail for most purposes; I’ll use it if I have to but I may procrastinate making a call, and I dislike voicemail. I always transcribe the pertinent details into a blank text document on the computer (sometimes on a piece of paper), delete the voicemail, and either reply by take care of a request, send a reply — by email — or add an Outlook Task entry for the item with the transcribed details as the body so I don’t forget and I have the phone number. Rarely do I actually return the call with another call, at least, if I can help it. Sometimes you can’t avoid it, or it will work better to just make the call.
I used to be able to avoid phone calls before I started working. When you work in a retail story, or at a desk in an office, it usually forces some phone time, and it’s been good for me. I’m much better on the phone than I used to be, but that doesn’t mean I actually like it!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m with everyone else in hating getting greeted by a computer menu when I’m trying to call tech support — or worse, a sales person! It’s not that I dislike not having to talk with a human, but it prolongs the phone time (it can take five minutes to communicate the same information a human could have taken and redirected my call with in five seconds — maybe ten), wasting my time and insulting my intelligence (yes, I typed 5……4……3……2…….1. A whole lot faster than you said it back to me, too! “Please listen carefully as our menu has changed.” Really? Since the last time I called five minutes ago and went through this whole thing before you disconnected me? If you’re putting that much effort into changing your menu that quickly, answer the phone already! Can you tell I’ve dealt with this recently? ;-)
So anyway, email me. If I’m at the computer and your email warrants a response I have the answer to right away, you’ll probably get it as fast as I can type it. If you call me, you’re probably interrupting something so I’ll have to be short and probably call you back anyway, so as not to be rude with the person I’m already with, or so I can finish up what I was in the middle of so I can focus on you. Email gives me that chance, even if you email me asking me to call you! I’m more likely to return that request (and remember to!) if it can’t just go in one ear and out the other, since email doesn’t just go away.
This post was supposed to be a paragraph or two. Yikes, it’s turning into an email! (If you’d read any of my work emails over the past year (my second year of full-time at my current job started March 3rd!), you would likely see a pattern of really long emails switching into short(er) emails that clearly in plain english state the most important information first, with ancillary info down near the bottom where apparently no one in my office other than me gets to when reading an email. I modified my style after finding this last fact out, plus a few nice notices from boss & coworkers that shorter emails may actually be read :-)
Notice I don’t feel the same constraints in blog posts. But I do need to get to bed, got a busy week this week! My to-do list grew by leaps and bounds Monday, even though I got a lot done and checked off. And most of it is “must do this week” priority! Oh well, a lot of that gets knocked into next week every week, some stuff just doesn’t seem as important any more after you haven’t done it :-) Just kidding…it’s a matter of prioritizing as usual. Can’t get it all done, but I try. I’m just juggling a few major decisions that need testing to get to a conclusion and I have hard deadlines for some by the end of this week or we’ll be locked into thousands of dollars worth of spending. Hey, no pressure! :-)
How do I handle it? I call on the smart people for help! Nothing like someone who can say “been there, done that!”
On a goodnight sidenote, this essay called “The Tyranny of Email“:http://www.w-uh.com/articles/030308-tyranny_of_email.html that kicks off the above-mentioned article, is well-written and brings up some good points. I don’t agree with a lot of them, as you may pick up after reading my entry here. Or at least, I don’t know if I could bring myself to implement most of the suggestions, even if I wanted to. Yeah, that’s more accurate :-)
Actually, the follow-up post entitled “‘Tyranny’ Revisited“:http://www.w-uh.com/articles/030316-tyranny_revisited.html is even more useful, and agreeable, to me. Just one gem of the bunch:
Whenever you are not doing something which requires concentration, by all means, run your email client, run your IM client, have notifications turned on, take ‘phone calls, the works. But when you really need to get work done, turn everything off. Isolate yourself. Okay, enough about that.
The layout of a workday, under the heading “Three Hours?”, is interesting, but I agree, purely theoretical.
And if you’re still with me, the post “I am an Iterator“:http://www.w-uh.com/posts/030315a-iterator.html at the same site is interesting to think about. I probably fit that profile on some things, for a set period of time until I lose interest. Until then, I tend to follow that pattern of redoing things to get closer to perfection, but in a very, very limited capacity. And rarely in my writing, as I hate, hate, hate editing! I can probably count on my fingers the times I’ve really gone back and edited something I’ve written for more than surface spelling errors and maybe a bit of basic grammar. Hope you can’t tell too much :-)
