-Peter Drucker
If you have ever called me, you are likely either AMAZED or ANNOYED by what you experience consistently… I do NOT answer and you GET my voice mail. I make no excuses or explanations for WHY I do it. I want to CONTROL my time and prevent anyone else from intruding on that.
Why would someone be so POMPOUS to think they can just send everyone to voice mail? Frankly, I grew TIRED of always playing catch up with pointless phone calls and unfocused discussions. Consider the last "important call" that you responded to during a time of focus at work or at home. How IMPORTANT was the call? How URGENT was the persons need? How much TIME did it take you to regain your focus and groove from the phone call?
RESPECT for others time begins with respect for your OWN! If you continually allow people to interfere in your focus times by "popping by to chat" or "randomly call you," then should EXPECT that they will abuse that privilege as often as possible. They are not bad people… they just want to shift whatever STRESS they have on them to you, hence why they come to YOU to solve the problem. How PRODUCTIVE can you be if you are rarely FOCUSED on what you need to get done because you spend all your time putting out others fires??
2 DEGREE SUCCESS STEP:
As a point of clarification, I am VERY accessible. I am quite easy to reach on the phone if it is an EMERGENCY (consider what a real emergency is) by asking people to hang up and ring back IMMEDIATELY. For calls made back to back, I will ALWAYS pick up – no questions asked! (I ask you make sure it IS an emergency).
Let's analyze this… what have I ASKED of people? Simply put, I have asked them to communicate with me in the most time effective and personally respective ways possible – email for non emergency needs, voice mail (if you don't like email) and DIRECT calls in the event of an emergency. I will ALWAYS respond to you and return phone necessary calls at 11:15am and 4:15pm.
Will this WORK for you? Sure, if you are willing to take the initial "HEAT" for making such a move. Regardless, you had better LEARN and IMPLEMENT a way to control your day, your time and your focus. If not, you will find more and more days where you were BUSY, but never PRODUCTIVE.
Cheers,
Zach
*To enjoy past editions of the Morning Motivator go to – http://grow-learn-lead.blogspot.com
The Morning Motivator is a copyrighted publication. The use of this article is open for print or publication with proper citations.
No comments:
Post a Comment