Personally, this kind of thing is part of how I control the phone rather than have the phone control me, all of which reduces stress and even increases productivity at a professional level.
An SMS or similar kind of message always gets stored, and I can check it when its convenient for me.
Phone calls only get stored if the other side actually records a voice mail, so there is pressure to pick up a phone call immediatelly, “just in case they don’t leave a voicemail” which might very well be interrupting work on a complex task that shouldn’t be interrupted.
Yeah, I also use that to further segregate things by level of importance: there’s lots of unimportant stuff coming in via that channel, so if a person on the other side can’t be arsed to leave a voicemail, it’s not important enough.
The SMS option just allows further segregation of important-non-urgent from important-urgent: for me an SMS might have something I should know or is good to know (say, confirmation of a doctor’s appointment) but have plenty of time to deal with (say, it’s in 2 weeks) so it works well for automated messages (plus it’s faster to read and SMS message tend to be a lot shorter and to the point than voicemail)
In the old days of WFH I would further segregate it by “if it’s really really urgent come to my desk” which further filters for importance based on the effort others are willing to put on it by coming to me with it.
In my professionally life I’ve concluded that a lot of unecessary stress comes from unimportant, important-urgent and important-non-urgent all coming in via the same channels and me having to treat everything as “possibly important and urgent” when most of it is no such thing, hence my filtering by-effort-required, which is not perfect but works way better than most people’s approach to it.
Personally, this kind of thing is part of how I control the phone rather than have the phone control me, all of which reduces stress and even increases productivity at a professional level.
An SMS or similar kind of message always gets stored, and I can check it when its convenient for me.
Phone calls only get stored if the other side actually records a voice mail, so there is pressure to pick up a phone call immediatelly, “just in case they don’t leave a voicemail” which might very well be interrupting work on a complex task that shouldn’t be interrupted.
My philosophy is that if it’s important, they’ll leave a voicemail. If they don’t leave a voicemail, then sorry, I’m not calling back.
Yeah, I also use that to further segregate things by level of importance: there’s lots of unimportant stuff coming in via that channel, so if a person on the other side can’t be arsed to leave a voicemail, it’s not important enough.
The SMS option just allows further segregation of important-non-urgent from important-urgent: for me an SMS might have something I should know or is good to know (say, confirmation of a doctor’s appointment) but have plenty of time to deal with (say, it’s in 2 weeks) so it works well for automated messages (plus it’s faster to read and SMS message tend to be a lot shorter and to the point than voicemail)
In the old days of WFH I would further segregate it by “if it’s really really urgent come to my desk” which further filters for importance based on the effort others are willing to put on it by coming to me with it.
In my professionally life I’ve concluded that a lot of unecessary stress comes from unimportant, important-urgent and important-non-urgent all coming in via the same channels and me having to treat everything as “possibly important and urgent” when most of it is no such thing, hence my filtering by-effort-required, which is not perfect but works way better than most people’s approach to it.
My philosophy is that only important people have my phone number.
Everyone else can contact me by mail.