Zen Productivity Blog

I recently came across this article through Steve Rubel’s blog about a man who works remotely for IBM and has the title, Social Media Evangelist. Fitting to his title, he promotes the usage of social media technologies such as blogs, wikis and twitter as well as instant messenger and the telephone instead of e-mail. To me, this begged the question of what was so bad about e-mail, and what was so great about these other methods of communication.

My work is almost all customer service oriented and I run a one-man shop, so I’ve never entertained using blogs, wikis and twitter as part of my work because those mediums simply aren’t a good place for confidential client communications. However, I have and do use instant messenger, the telephone and e-mail and I have strong feelings about each one.

Using instant messenger (IM) is quite popular in my area of work – online advertising – because almost everyone who works in it is in front of a computer most of the day. It is seen often as an efficiency because you can shoot over a question to someone else and get a response often pretty quickly and using less time than making a phone call. My problem with it? One – it interrupts what I’m doing and breaks my concentration. After responding to the IM, it takes some time to get back into the rhythm of what I was doing and it is frustrating. Two – it makes communicating with someone too easy. I’ve gotta say that about 50% of the time I receive a question via IM, the sender already has the answer and they are too lazy to go into their archive of files or e-mails to find it. Then, a lot of the times, I respond by telling them where they can find the answer (If I know the answer off the top of my head, I give them the answer in order to be polite). I believe that if it’s harder to contact someone for a question, it forces that person to work harder at finding the answer themselves, which I think is a good thing. My response to these findings is that I simply either keep instant messenger off for most of the day, and definitely off when I’m trying to be productive.

The telephone is a disruptor as well. When it rings, it catches your attention and breaks your concentration. If you let calls go to voicemail, you lose productivity as well. However, phone calls are invaluable when it comes to relationship building or getting on the same page with someone on a topic that requires some back and forth. What I do here is I set my phone to silent, so that I can’t get distracted by the ring. I also have the voicemail feature turned off so that no one can leave me a voicemail. If I want to have a call with someone, I can still just call them. Otherwise we set up a call time using e-mail.

E-mail is really the most efficient form of communication in most circumstances for me. There’s a record of each communication, it doesn’t disrupt you so you can read them when you’re ready to and often people will put a little more thought into constructing them (this isn’t always the case as many people know, but at least more so than instant messenger in my opinion).