Every caller gets an answer.
It seemed like a simple promise when I made it 12 years ago. It’s easy to stick to it because the payoff is huge: you don’t learn much from the amen chorus of loyal readers. But you discover a great deal when listening to your loyal critics.
Plus, there’s satisfaction in the careful practice of active listening that inevitably turns a shouting mad caller into a mere grumbler who can even concede that their worthless &%*! hometown paper does indeed need to report unpleasant facts about Uncle Fraud or Brother Jailbird.
Weepers are more difficult. Telling a neighbor (several homes ago, so stop trying to guess!) that I couldn’t pull her DUI arrest from the weekly dispositions was no fun at all.
But I digress…There may be a business lesson in the evolution of my system for keeping track of those calls.
First, I scribbled everything into Franklin dayplanners. But time, being a scarce commodity, runs out and so I found myself copying messages forward in the book, a waste of time.
Palm Pilot
I bought one of the early Palm Pilots, taught myself to write on its screen, synch it with my computer, manage calendars…but I still was spending time managing my management system when I could have been talking to readers. It wasn’t making me any faster. In busy seasons it could take me a month to answer every call.
“Eureka!”, I thought when I got my first Blackberry. NOW I’ve got it…phone, calendar and notebook all in one. But it actually takes longer to key in notes on a Blackberry than it did to write them on paper, and the value of permanent storage is slim when phone messages need only survive until answered…
Blackberry
Then I began reading about the PDA rebellion of certain Silicon Valley tech geeks, the bleeding edge of the Personal Digital Assistant market. They had moved their to-do lists, phone call-back lists and daily reminder notes to….index cards.
Applying engineering analysis, they concluded most of a PDA’s chores can be most efficiently handled with a pocket-sized stack of paper.
Which is why I’ve started carrying a pocket notebook. I log in calls from my answering machine and then cross them out when I’ve answered them…It still takes a lot of time to answer all those calls, (and in a lame attempt at levity I occasionally open with “I’ve got a message here that you called in 1951) but with a simple notebook, now more of my time goes to the phone than to some over-hyped efficiency system. Now, if only I could take a similar approach to email handling. Hello keyboard, meet Mr. Hammer.
High-efficiency device: notebook
I like a pocket notebook, stickies program on the computer—-and a dry erase board. Plus, I tell people that the cat doesn’t answer the phone. Kind of a Koan for the too-busy.