Don’t ignore people

You’ve got 100s of unread emails, I know.

You’re interrupted every five minutes with minor problems, I know.

You’re managing geographically and generationally fragmented teams across myriad communication platforms, I know.

Sometimes your whole day is comprised of other people’s to do lists and you finish feeling emotionally spent without any of the rewards of productivity.

I know, because I’ve been there.

But ignoring people isn’t the solution.

It costs more than you think.

It plays into our deepest fears of social ostracism.

At best, it induces anxiety.

At worst, it feels like a display of power, control or punishment.

When really, it’s just that we don’t have time to reply.

And so, how can we get our most effective work done if we’re constantly sacrificing proactive focus for reactive attention?

Instead of ignoring or avoiding people, try this instead:

• Choose stewardship delegation over gopher delegation, investing more time handing over responsibility at the beginning of a project and less time trouble-shooting as you go along.

• Pick up the phone: you can cover five email exchanges in one call, whilst also reading mood, building rapport and giving your eyes a rest from the screen.

• Schedule, communicate and protect an hour of ‘deep-focus flow-time’ each day for your important but never urgent work and muster all your self-control to resist internal and external distractions.

• Manage expectations by replying to email at set times, thrice a day for a fixed amount of time and let people know they can call you if it can’t wait 3 hours.

• Triage incoming communication; like in A and E, things are either urgent and important, not urgent but important, urgent but not important or neither urgent nor important. Triage then action in that order.

Which of these works for you?