There are people I would always answer the phone to (worth remembering that my phone doesn't actually ring for anyone, so I'm always getting shouted at by my wife for not answering the phone to her), but there are people whom I would always return my call to if I saw a missed call on my phone. People I would always pick up for, regardless, but not so many, and not a big list of people, and there are many, many more that I won't pick up for immediately, unless I have the space in my life at that time, which is rare.
So, it's interesting when you work this way, when you don't answer the email or the text or the WhatsApp immediately, and when you don't pick up the phone for everyone who phones.
One of the things that happens is people phone you less, and find ways to work around how to get to you (WhatsApp is a curse these days because people feel like once they've sent a WhatsApp, they have you, which is why I refuse to answer most of my WhatsApps quickly).
This phenomenon, though this issue in society was brought home to me the other day when I was having a day's holiday after the bank holiday.
I've been really bad this year at booking holidays off, which is crazy, and so what I decided last week was I was not going to work on Tuesday or Thursday or the Friday, and my patients are already booked in, I would see, but actually, apart from that, not much else.
I am actually allowed to have holidays sometimes.
So, then I get a WhatsApp from someone who works with one of our partners, someone who I've known for a long time, who asked me for a chat.
When I get it, I'm actually sitting in a cafe after having ridden hard on my bike for two hours in the heat, I'm just having a can of Coke, and contemplating life and I decided to look to see if there's any WhatsApp, and so there was one that came in that said, " Can we have a chat?”, I messaged back, (stupidly) saying “I'm actually on holiday, so unless it's really time sensitive, can we leave it till next week?”
The reply came back saying “It's actually really urgent”, and so I agreed to phone them back about an hour later when I got home. I came off the call quite underwhelmed, because it was something that was utterly not urgent and not necessary to speak to me about while I was on holiday, but it was somebody else's urgent, not my urgent.
This is an insight that is particularly interesting for all of us, how much of our time do we spend on someone else's gent, and how much do we spend on ours, and remembering that old matrix that Seth Godin posted years ago, which is a cross with four quadrants.
The quadrants are top left, which is urgent, non-important; the bottom left, which is non-urgent, non-important. Top right, which is urgent, important; bottom right, which is non-urgent, important; and in that old matrix that Seth Gordon produced, the place we should be working most is the non-urgent, important place.
That's where the good s**t gets done, that's where progress is made. Urgent, important, although important, is less important than non-urgent important, and someone else's urgent important is rarely as important as you.
Blog Post Number - 4552
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