The ease of communications can encourage inefficiency

The trouble with communications today is that there’s too much of it. By the time you hang up the telephone, you could have a dozen voice mail and e-mail messages waiting for you. There seems to be no way of stopping people who want to contact you. The convenience of voice mail and e-mail encourages people to leave messages rather than think through the problems themselves, get the information elsewhere or delay until you are available.

One seminar participant told me it takes two hours each day to review voice mail messages. Another said that he replied to e-mail messages at night when he got home. A third person claimed that they received over one hundred voice mail messages daily.

How do they cope? Something has to suffer. It could be the quality of their work, their family life or their health. Perhaps they are putting important projects on hold, infringing on their creativity or planning time or overlooking opportunities. One person told me that they deleted most e-mail messages unread and ignored voice mail messages altogether. An extreme measure to say the least.

The ease of communications encourages far too much of it. When it is necessary to leave a message, we must tell the receiver not to respond if we have already explained everything in the message. According to one set of statistics, 80% of telephone calls require only one-way communication. If this is true, there should be fewer messages that say, "Please return my call," and a lot more that say, "Not necessary to call me back. Just want to update you on the XYZ account."

When you leave a message, respect the other person’s time. Be brief, speak clearly and slowly, repeat your name and telephone number and tell them when you can be reached. A little time invested in planning your calls could save a lot of time at the other end.