Don't Talk To Me ... Well Do But .. erm ...
2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur
" I remember the days before email. For those of you who don’t, you probably won’t understand how important the phone was as a
communication device. If the phone rang, you answered it. Today,
answering the phone when you are around other people is considered
insulting.
Stop! It's rant time: You will note I left off drop-in F2F communication ... that is because I refuse to perpetuate that rudeness in any form. Call me a recluse, call me a hermit, call me a weirdo freak of the week ... but unless you and I are on friendly shoot-the-shit terms - I seriously don't want to see your face standing in my doorway. When I am sitting at my desk it is because I am working on something, probably a task I received via one of my sanctioned communication methods. Just because you are physically in front of me does not mean you are going to get better or faster service than you would have had you sent me an email or submitted a ticket, in fact, I will probably stare at you closed mouth with my mind wandering while you babble ... only to close our conversation by asking you to send me an email. I am sorry, I really am, but I get gushes of information crammed down my throat in a veritable river of muck every waking hour ... and this is how I compute information ... it's a system that works for me. Okay, rant concluded.
IM (Instant Messaging)
I love IM, so much so that I actively use Googletalk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM, Skype, and our corp offering, Sametime, to communicate with all of the contacts I have accumulated over the last ... 15 or so years. Through the magic of IM consolidators like Pidgen and Trillian managing that many different service providers is much easier, but if I want to use the full options from any of the individual clients I of course have to download their IM client. I am not into emoticons or backgrounds or that kind of stuff, but there are some useful tools like photo sharing in Y Messenger that make the download and extra icon worth it. Plus, I like the noise it makes when I get email from my Yahoo account. MSN Messenger ties into the presence part of the MS Office Suite, and because I love that level of interoperability I have that client downloaded too. I am happy with Sametime because most of my contacts @ work use it, but there is by no means full adoption at my company ... which is disappointing and sort of a let down.
Incident Reports
Not much to say here, I get assigned tickets related to SharePoint and I resolve them ... per our SLOs it is most important to make near immediate contact with the customer and then continue until the ticket is resolved. Ticket volume is tracked and so that lends an additional sense of importance, but even without that I work to quickly resolve issues that are submitted via the proper channels ... my goal is to resolve tickets with 2 days from submission.
Email
I could go on for days here probably, so I will save detail for another post and just try to summarize. I receive a lot of email ... a lot. Some of it is just distribution list stuff that I toss, but a good deal of it actually requires me to read and process. Applying the principles of TBYL, I am trying to only read and process my email twice a day during scheduled times. This has not really been overly successful for me yet because I live and die by email communication. It doesn't hold the informality of IM, but for me an email has a sense of importance that a simple phone call no longer holds. Weird, right? In addition, email communications can very easily be translated into a task or strategic next objective ... how is that for leveraging all my tools?
Online Networks
Oh, I love this one because of the way that my online networking so seamlessly carried over from personal to corporate. The first online community I got involved with was myspace - and that was to communicate with my cousins who were away @ college. Through myspace a bunch of old classmates caught up with me as well ... I won't rave about that because ... well, maybe I didn't necessarily want to be caught up with. Anyways, in general, I am not a fan of myspace - so when I was introduced to Facebook I jumped on it. It was the weirdest thing, I had gotten into Facebook maybe for 2 months when all the sudden it seemed like it was all the newest rage in the corporate arena. Suddenly my networks from my company and companies I work with like Microsoft grew at an exponential rate. In addition, contacts I made personally seemed to constantly be asking "do you facebook?" ... now I find myself monitoring my contacts Facebook status pretty regularly. And Twitter ... ah Twitter ... I can't really remember how I started Tweeting, it might have been one of my really smart co-workers who turned me on to it. Now, I live to Tweet. I do know for sure that it was one of my coworkers who encouraged me to start blogging, and look at me now ;P ... and my latest happy happy joy joy is Flock, the social browser that brings all of my online networks, personal email, media tracking, blogging, and RSS feeds into one spot - saving me serious time and amping up the cool factor all over again.
Text Messaging
hmmm ... what to say about texting? Well, I use it to send messages ... and I receive them occasionally ... but never in time (if the issue was urgent) because I don't really look @ my cell phone often enough. I probably should, but I don't because frankly I can't stand looking @ that "One or More Voicemail Messages" notification. Usually the best time for texting with me is when I am expecting it or when I am in a meeting and don't have access to my laptop ... because I am looking for something to do.
Telephone / VM
This one will turn into a rant post later on, I know it. I struggle with the phone issue on a daily basis because it seems that if I answer the phone I will never get off of it in under 10 minutes. That could be my fault, even, because despite the evidence in this post I am actually a pretty friendly person. I like to listen to people and try to understand people, I just don't find verbal conversations a good way to process tasks. Maybe it is because I get so deep in trying to hear what the other person is saying and find my mind wandering all big picture ... but there are just so many better ways to assign actions. I do listen to my corporate VM, although I admit that now that I get VMs in my inbox 80% of the time I respond via email. Actually, make that 95% of the time. re: Personal VM, I don't check it but maybe once every couple of weeks ... the important people in my life should, by now, realize email is the best way to communicate with me.
That was a looong post and I think I may have falled asleep part of the way through **blush** so ya'll out there must be snoring by now. I promise, next time I will slip in some hilarious jokes and/or witty references.
" I remember the days before email. For those of you who don’t, you probably won’t understand how important the phone was as a
communication device. If the phone rang, you answered it. Today,
answering the phone when you are around other people is considered
insulting.
The wonderful thing about email is that it’s asynchronous, meaning
you don’t need to deal with it when it is first received. For me and
many others, instant messaging is basically the same - I may respond to
an IM instantly, or 24 hours later. The recipient generally understands
that a response might be delayed, and doesn’t take offense. Facebook
messages, Twitter and cell phone text messages all have similar
benefits " - Micheal Arrington @ TechCrunch
Let me start by saying I fall into the category of not remembering days before email, however, I remember with vivid detail how telephone communication held a burning sense of urgency for me that ... well ... it definitely doesn't now. And as my IT dept continues to roll out new ways of communicating (new only to my company, not the rest of the world) I find myself increasingly engaged in conversations with online communication/collaboration n00bs as to what level of importance the different methods of communication should have. As you know, I love to impart my own experience on others (and I am no expert on any of this stuff anyways - so experience and personal opinion is all I have) and for some reason, some people do seem to listen (well at least they aren't drooling on the table while I speak).
For organization sake I'll start by listing the ways in which I receive inbound communication:- IM (corporate & personal)
- Incident Reports (tickets through corporate incident mgmt system)
- Email (corporate & personal)
- Online Networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, myspace, blog comments)
- Text Messaging
- Telephone / VM (desk phone & cell phone)
Stop! It's rant time: You will note I left off drop-in F2F communication ... that is because I refuse to perpetuate that rudeness in any form. Call me a recluse, call me a hermit, call me a weirdo freak of the week ... but unless you and I are on friendly shoot-the-shit terms - I seriously don't want to see your face standing in my doorway. When I am sitting at my desk it is because I am working on something, probably a task I received via one of my sanctioned communication methods. Just because you are physically in front of me does not mean you are going to get better or faster service than you would have had you sent me an email or submitted a ticket, in fact, I will probably stare at you closed mouth with my mind wandering while you babble ... only to close our conversation by asking you to send me an email. I am sorry, I really am, but I get gushes of information crammed down my throat in a veritable river of muck every waking hour ... and this is how I compute information ... it's a system that works for me. Okay, rant concluded.
IM (Instant Messaging)
I love IM, so much so that I actively use Googletalk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM, Skype, and our corp offering, Sametime, to communicate with all of the contacts I have accumulated over the last ... 15 or so years. Through the magic of IM consolidators like Pidgen and Trillian managing that many different service providers is much easier, but if I want to use the full options from any of the individual clients I of course have to download their IM client. I am not into emoticons or backgrounds or that kind of stuff, but there are some useful tools like photo sharing in Y Messenger that make the download and extra icon worth it. Plus, I like the noise it makes when I get email from my Yahoo account. MSN Messenger ties into the presence part of the MS Office Suite, and because I love that level of interoperability I have that client downloaded too. I am happy with Sametime because most of my contacts @ work use it, but there is by no means full adoption at my company ... which is disappointing and sort of a let down.
Incident Reports
Not much to say here, I get assigned tickets related to SharePoint and I resolve them ... per our SLOs it is most important to make near immediate contact with the customer and then continue until the ticket is resolved. Ticket volume is tracked and so that lends an additional sense of importance, but even without that I work to quickly resolve issues that are submitted via the proper channels ... my goal is to resolve tickets with 2 days from submission.
I could go on for days here probably, so I will save detail for another post and just try to summarize. I receive a lot of email ... a lot. Some of it is just distribution list stuff that I toss, but a good deal of it actually requires me to read and process. Applying the principles of TBYL, I am trying to only read and process my email twice a day during scheduled times. This has not really been overly successful for me yet because I live and die by email communication. It doesn't hold the informality of IM, but for me an email has a sense of importance that a simple phone call no longer holds. Weird, right? In addition, email communications can very easily be translated into a task or strategic next objective ... how is that for leveraging all my tools?
Online Networks
Oh, I love this one because of the way that my online networking so seamlessly carried over from personal to corporate. The first online community I got involved with was myspace - and that was to communicate with my cousins who were away @ college. Through myspace a bunch of old classmates caught up with me as well ... I won't rave about that because ... well, maybe I didn't necessarily want to be caught up with. Anyways, in general, I am not a fan of myspace - so when I was introduced to Facebook I jumped on it. It was the weirdest thing, I had gotten into Facebook maybe for 2 months when all the sudden it seemed like it was all the newest rage in the corporate arena. Suddenly my networks from my company and companies I work with like Microsoft grew at an exponential rate. In addition, contacts I made personally seemed to constantly be asking "do you facebook?" ... now I find myself monitoring my contacts Facebook status pretty regularly. And Twitter ... ah Twitter ... I can't really remember how I started Tweeting, it might have been one of my really smart co-workers who turned me on to it. Now, I live to Tweet. I do know for sure that it was one of my coworkers who encouraged me to start blogging, and look at me now ;P ... and my latest happy happy joy joy is Flock, the social browser that brings all of my online networks, personal email, media tracking, blogging, and RSS feeds into one spot - saving me serious time and amping up the cool factor all over again.
Text Messaging
hmmm ... what to say about texting? Well, I use it to send messages ... and I receive them occasionally ... but never in time (if the issue was urgent) because I don't really look @ my cell phone often enough. I probably should, but I don't because frankly I can't stand looking @ that "One or More Voicemail Messages" notification. Usually the best time for texting with me is when I am expecting it or when I am in a meeting and don't have access to my laptop ... because I am looking for something to do.
Telephone / VM
This one will turn into a rant post later on, I know it. I struggle with the phone issue on a daily basis because it seems that if I answer the phone I will never get off of it in under 10 minutes. That could be my fault, even, because despite the evidence in this post I am actually a pretty friendly person. I like to listen to people and try to understand people, I just don't find verbal conversations a good way to process tasks. Maybe it is because I get so deep in trying to hear what the other person is saying and find my mind wandering all big picture ... but there are just so many better ways to assign actions. I do listen to my corporate VM, although I admit that now that I get VMs in my inbox 80% of the time I respond via email. Actually, make that 95% of the time. re: Personal VM, I don't check it but maybe once every couple of weeks ... the important people in my life should, by now, realize email is the best way to communicate with me.
That was a looong post and I think I may have falled asleep part of the way through **blush** so ya'll out there must be snoring by now. I promise, next time I will slip in some hilarious jokes and/or witty references.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
0 comments:
Post a Comment