As a business owner, I sometimes feel a shiver when the phone rings. But I’m not worried about bill collectors, thankfully. Even if I was, this category of calls is far, far worse.
I fear the time collectors.
If only they just wanted money! Time collectors are people who make those calls that eat up your day without providing any strategic or even surprise value. Sometimes it’s legitimate client or prospect inquiries that simply would be better to handle by another channel, but usually it’s someone who’s bored and needs your help to kill the clock on their day (a whole other rant coming on that one…)
I don’t know why I keep taking these calls. Caller ID should have cured this for me, but it somehow made it worse. If I see who’s calling, and I know they’re the type who leaves long messages, I’m faced with dealing with the problem now or having to listen to a message, try to call back, and then have to hear the story again. For some people, the voice mail is a magic token to pass, and once the message has been left, no further action will be taken until you call back, so there’s no hope in letting time pass and having the problem go away.
It’s also important to keep these time collector calls as short as possible, something I haven’t been great at so far. I’m thinking of going back to pre-scheduling all of my time for the week in advance, so I can legitimately say I’ve only got a few minutes until my next booking. But mostly I think this just falls into the “saying no is hard” category of stuff.
And overall, the solution really falls to just not answering the phone. One of my mentors communicates almost entirely through pre-scheduled calls and then faxes for the “spontaneous” stuff. I don’t think that’ll work for my particular business model, and running a company is lonely lonely stuff to begin with, so I don’t really want to shut off that much human contact. That said, it’s sometimes fun to dream…
Photo by vvvracer
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