with Britt Reints
Forget the 9 to 5; Full Time, All the Time is a blog about the mobile working life - when you have the freedom to work from anywhere and the responsibility of always having your smartphone turned on. Britt Reints works as a freelance writer while traveling fulltime in an RV with her husband and two kids. She explores balancing real-life bills with an unconventional work life, and finding time to maintain relationships with family and friends.
You can also find Britt at InPursuitOfHappiness.net.
|
Who among us would not love to work less and play more? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could replace pointless meetings with our favorite hobbies? What would you do to create a Utopian world with no unnecessary client calls or annoying “reply all” emails? Would you lie? Stretch the truth?
I’m currently listening to the audiobook version of The 4-Hour Workweek
He also suggests that you can save yourself a lot of time if you tell a few half truths here and there.
For example, you can avoid lengthy phone calls by asking “how can I help you?” right away instead of doing the “how are you?” dance for a few minutes. Good advice. And if that doesn’t work, you can encourage a shorter call by saying, “I have another call in five minutes, how can I help you in the next couple minutes?” Or try, “I’m in the middle of something right now but I’d be happy to help, is this something you can email me about?”
Want to skip out on a meeting? Propose the idea of working instead of attending meetings and having someone recap the meeting for you later. Or, make up an excuse to get out of the meeting and prove that no one missed you anyway in order to avoid future meetings.
While these ideas are probably effective, and I can certainly see a need for a technique to avoid pointless work, the means to the end seem to come uncomfortably close to crossing an ethical line.
If you say you have a call in five minutes and you do not - isn’t that lying?
If you could go to the meeting but make up an excuse not to just to prove a point later - isn’t that manipulating the truth?
But more importantly - is that OK?
There is no hard and fast answer, I know. Legally, technically, there is no law against pretending to be busier than you are. But personally, setting a precedent of relying on smoke and mirrors to achieve the desired outcome seems like a bad idea. You run the risk of becoming the person who’s willing to say anything to get what they want - and who can predict where that behavioral boundary begins and ends?
But man if those rambling phone calls aren’t time sucks!
Is a little white lie worth a little more time?
How bizarre…
I wonder how this works in the real world. I can imagine that if you are ducking meetings, etc. and your boss doesn’t actually see you, will he/she come to the conclusion that you are unnecessary? I suppose it depends on what you do.
I’m not a big fan of lying beyond those little social white lies you tell to avoid hurting people’s feelings. Apparently this will not work for me.
Finn | September 1st, 2010 at 12:54 pm
God yes, I’d lie to get off the phone. And the “how may I help you” idea is brilliant.
I hardly ever answer my phone, and my voicemail message says the best way to reach me is by email, and gives my address. I hate talking on the phone at work because it means stopping my thought process. When I’m writing, I turn off my email and my phone and shut my door with a do-not-disturb sign on it.
The most important thing I’ve learned to do at work is to protect my time. By doing so [especially by saying no to meetings and projects and requests for help that are outside of my immediate job descripiton] I’ve been able to increase my productivity on the items I’m graded on. And that’s what pays off.
lynn @ human, being | September 2nd, 2010 at 10:47 pm
I hate most phone calls. So I let most of them go to voice mail. No lying required.
I hate the idea of lying, although I’d be lying if I said I “never” did it. Sometimes the person you’re dealing with isn’t going to give up until you say “yeah, yeah,” even though you’re really thinking “hell no.” My preference is to be truthful but vague rather than all-out lying. But, that’s not really honest either, is it?
I think one real problem is that some people don’t understand how unprofessional and intrusive it is to force an answer people shouldn’t have to give. (Does that sentence make sense? Don’t answer that!) I mean, if you don’t need to know something about my private life or my detailed schedule, don’t ask. And don’t micro-manage me to the point where I have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. If you remember your boundaries, I will probably never feel the temptation to fib.
And the other thing is, you should always assume the person on the other end of the phone is very busy. Get off the phone as soon as you can, even if you yourself are feeling chatty. Most people are too polite to hang up on you, so don’t put them in that position.
Today I was on one of those lo-o-o-ong calls with a client who loves to hear himself talk. And I needed a bio break. I was very tempted to say I had to get on another call; and if he hadn’t shut up fairly soon after that, I might have done that. I mean, are there better options in that situation?
SKL | September 3rd, 2010 at 12:05 pm
I use this trick all the time…too many of my clients whine and ramble. So, I make up an appointment in 5 minutes. Honestly, I’m able to help them a lot more and a lot faster if I’m not chained to their phonecalls. So, it’s a white lie, like what Forrest Gump told about the ping pong paddle.
muskrat | September 15th, 2010 at 6:12 am
Rarely to I get a business phone call (Praise the Lord!!), so when I do it’s fast and to the point because neither the client nor I want to be dealing with the situation.
I have been in jobs where Time Suck was it’s first and last name.
Depends on the job, if you find that you are in a Time Suck job then ya probably gotta lie at some point if you wanna be productive.
Darla | September 18th, 2010 at 4:54 pm