The telephone is one of those distractions in your working day that without fail interrupts your train of thought. It is not to be under estimated how much of a massive interruption on your day the telephone is. It is without doubt time well spent reviewing who phones you and how you communicate on the phone. This article should give you some real pointers on getting some of that time back by reducing the amount of people that phone you.

THE OBJECTIVE: STOP PEOPLE CALLING
This may seem like a hard thing to do, however it is not. Ultimately this task is about training people on how to communicate with you in the way that you want – this is Email. This first benefit to this form of communication is that email allows you to respond in your own time, thus removing the immediate distraction of a call. An email also means you have a pre-written message that can for forwarded or delegated to another person. For example if someone is phoning you with instructions, you may not ultimately be the person that will undertake these instructions. You can see now that it will be quicker for you to receive an email detailing all that is required that you can just forward on rather than spending time creating the email from the telephone conversation. This is a double win, saving time on the call and saving time writing an email!

So how do you do this? It is quite simple – Never answer you phone when it rings. That right NEVER! This may seem like overkill but once you have amended you answer phone message to the following all will make sense.

“Hello you are through to the voice mail of (YOUR NAME). I am unable to take your call. If you need to get hold of me today my preferred method of contact is via email. You can contact me at (YOUR EMAIL). If however you need to get hold of me immediately for something important please leave a message letting me know what you need and I will call you back as soon as I am able to do so. Thank you.”

This will really separate the people that actually listen to the ones that don’t. If you receive a phone message it is crucial that you listen to it immediately. If the person that called listened then the voice mail must be important! The message will fall into one of the following three categories and you deal with them as follows;

1) Call is from someone you know or don’t know and it is important
In this instance you phone them straight back as they require immediate response. People need to know you will respond as soon as possible if they leave an important message and it is important that you are true to your word. An important thing to note here is you are still phoning them back on your terms and by not answering the phone you were not still distracted by any task that you were doing. It is also worth noting that these people generally email as well. In this instance it is your decision on whether you call back or write an email back depending on the message.

2) Someone you know and its not important.
After listening to the message get back to these people back when you have finished the task you were doing before. When speaking with these people on your call back you must communicate that their call was not worthy of a phone message and they should have emailed as stated in your answer phone message. You can handle this in a number of ways. You can say during the call that they should have emailed for a quicker response and please do so in the future as its your preferred method of communication. Or you may want to be more direct and inform them that this was not a worthy reason for a phone message and an email would have been suffice so please do this in the future. You can be as rude, direct or as subtle as you like but ultimately that person should be aware that they should not leave phone messages unless they are absolutely necessary. You will find that most people will respect this and will not leave messages again until they think they are really important – at worst you have got them thinking before they just pick up the phone as a quick option for them. And if they do it again… email back a response to their call. They will soon be forced to communicate with you in your preferred method communication.

3) Someone you don’t know and its not important
Common calls that fall into this category are cold sales calls. In these instances delete the message and forget about it. Firstly, the call was not important but secondly and more importantly, do you really want to deal with a person that doesn’t listen nor respect your first clear instruction to them (i.e email if its not important) – No… I didn’t think so!

Suggested reading after reading this;
How To: Reduce time spent dealing with email

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