5 reasons I don’t pick up my phone (and neither should you!)

So my poor tele­phone is on its last legs, and I’m finally breaking down and get­ting a shiny new iPhone, for a wide variety of reasons. (It’s pretty! It does “smart” stuff that my Stu­pid­Phone Black­berry can’t! It can play music and take photos that don’t look totally ter­rible! Designing iPhone apps will be easier if I can actu­ally see how things work!)

This prob­ably means that I’ll be forced to finally change my voice­mail mes­sage, which is faulted for fea­turing a lengthy pause between me speaking and the beep, among other things like being mumbly and unclear. Since I very rarely pick up the phone, and I never pick it up when I don’t recog­nize the number, I am thinking I’ll change the mes­sage to read: “Hi! This is Sarah. I’m not picking up because I’m busy working on your pro­ject. Send me an email instead!”

My hatred for the tele­phone, I think, is well-justified. (I sound a little like a monkey on meth while on the tele­phone as well, but that’s irrel­evant. Mostly.) While some people seem to think it’s annoying that it’s so hard to get me on the tele­phone, I have my reasons, and I’m sticking by my guns.

1. I need to focus.

Every time you break from your work, it takes an average of twenty minutes to get back into whatever you were doing. Let’s say your phone rings four times a day—that’s at least an hour and a half of wasted time, most of which will likely be spent trying to coerce tele­marketers to take me off your damn list, already. If I’m talking to you on the phone, I’m not working. The less time of my time is spent doing actual bil­lable work, the higher my rates need to be. By not picking up my phone, I’m get­ting your pro­ject done faster and saving you money.

2. There’s no paper trail.

98% of all of my client com­mu­nic­a­tions take place via email. With email, it’s easy to search through con­ver­sa­tions to find out details I may have missed or to make sure I’m on the right track. If there’s any con­fu­sion about details of a pro­ject, you can simply back-reference an old email. You can take notes during a tele­phone meeting, but they aren’t nearly as reli­able a proof. This works to pro­tect both parties: if I tell you something’s going to cost $300 and then bill you for $600 (please note that this doesn’t happen) you can just send me back my ori­ginal email to explain why you’re not paying up. Again, saving you time and money!

My tele­phone is only mar­gin­ally “smarter” than this one. At present, it keeps trying to voice­dial, and then I yell at it to stop, which doesn’t help. It also typ­ic­ally won’t con­nect calls. At any rate, the whole “tele­phonics” thing seems to baffle it.

3. It’s better to think about what you’re saying.

A lot of the things that people call to talk about I can’t answer imme­di­ately. How much will this cost? (I don’t know. Give me five minutes to think about it, add up the num­bers, and figure it out.) Can we imple­ment this system? (I’m not sure. Let me look it up on the internet and see how it works.) The problem with the tele­phone is that it forces you to give imme­diate responses (five seconds of silence, while accept­able in person, feels like an eternity when you’re on the phone) that are likely to be less researched and well-thought-out than if you’d been given a moment to think.

4. It wastes everyone’s time.

Cor­di­al­ities are nice and everything, but hon­estly, my cli­ents aren’t paying for scin­til­lating chats about the weather, and I’d rather be spending my time making them great stuff instead of hearing about their cat’s liver dis­ease. I abso­lutely hate wasting time—none of us really has enough of it anyway—and we can get so much done, so much faster, with two emails than we can with twenty minutes on the phone. While, in theory, I’m sure it’d be pos­sible to dis­pense with the pleas­antaries and get right down to busi­ness, that sort of brusque beha­viour tends to makes people feel dehu­man­ized, which seems rather to defeat the pur­pose, no?

5. Email will get to me just as fast, anyway.

Most people in busi­ness get their email on their phone. Usu­ally, my emails actu­ally show up on my phone before they show up on my computer—either way, I am almost always accessing my email. My tele­phone, on the other hand, is less reliable—sometimes it’s down­stairs while I’m working upstairs, and I can’t hear it ring. Some­times it’s out of juice, or, like now, it’s just not working. Some­times I’m in a meeting. There tends to be this idea that if something’s urgent, it’s better to phone, but this simply isn’t true. If I’m in a meeting or on the bus, I won’t be able to listen to your voice­mail, but I sure can read your email. If it’s that urgent, I’d rather fix the issue and email you back in five minutes when it’s fixed, rather than dally around on the tele­phone for ten minutes, then fix it, then email you to let you know. See? Imme­diate results!

To sum up: the tele­phone, while it cer­tainly serves a cer­tain pur­pose, is gen­er­ally an out­moded, inef­fi­cient vehicle for com­mu­nic­a­tion that hampers pro­ductivity. Got a problem? Don’t call me—email me.

Tags: business, productivity, zen