It is easy to waste an entire day chatting online, IM, Email, you know the rest. Being succinct may allow you to get the point across more quickly and get on with your life. However people may mistake brevity for lack of interest and sometimes even confuse it with rudeness.
A typical online conversation tends to start off with a greeting followed by mutual exchange of small talk. Usually people ask you questions just because it is the norm, even thought they couldn’t care less about the answers. This is pointless and wastes time.
My days of over-productivity incentives are done. I am not advocating filling every second of your day with ultra-productive tasks, multi-tasking to the extreme to cross off hundreds of items from the almighty to-do list. I am talking about getting the small talk out of the way in order to allow focused time.
Why do we need the initial greeting? I can understand when you run into someone at the mall, you certainly don’t want to startle the person by walking up and them and completely skipping to the meat of the message without at least saying the usual ‘Hi’. But online is different. You are not going to be startle if the first message on a Skype window is: “Please resend the resume file”.
Why not just drop online chatting altogether? If you do, people will call more often, which is even more distracting. Not only that but people will email you asking you to get on IM. I find the combination of GTalk inside Gmail perfect, at intervals which I am checking email, I get to answer a few succinct chats online. On a schedule daily, I am on Skype for about two hours to iron out some work discussions. This has been working really well.
I just got back a few days ago from an incredible vacation to London, France and Barcelona. It is though to adapt to the daily grind again.
One of the most predominant things I have noticed is how much time and attention I spend daily on online communication. Some will say “necessary evil”, or even include it in the “cost of doing business”, does that mean it is good?
Between Skype, Campfire, AIM and email roughly 70% of the day is consumed with communicating. Is it the message that is so complex? Or are we spending time going in circles in order to achieve a sense of self-fulfillment?
Let’s spend a few seconds thinking about a car factory assembly line. By virtue of the loud machinery, employees rarely communicate with each other. An unwelcome interruption on the factory floor could become life threatening. How much more are they accomplishing by concentrating on the task ahead instead of randomly attending to pop-us on each corner of a computer screen?
This post will come to it’s demise with no clear solution, I truly wish I had one. Other than: “Close all communication tools and get some work done” I draw a blank.