The convenience of electronic communication shouldn't enable you to treat another's time as if it's unimportant (Robert's Rule #13)

[Tweeted 2011-05-15]

If you're like me, you get bombarded with electronic communication, often to the point that it becomes difficult to disconnect. If I'm out of the office for a day, I can easily have nearly 300 emails in my work email inbox. If I add that to the 4 personal email accounts, Twitter feed, Facebook posts, Skype messages, SMS messages, phone calls, et cetera, it quickly becomes overwhelming. It becomes such a factor, that there are times that I do not respond to attempts to communicate.

If I choose to take myself offline for a period, people sometimes react with annoyance and I remind them that I maintain my email accounts and pay my cell phone bill because I intend for those things to make my life more convenient. However, all of that is from my perspective, and others that I have talked to say the same thing (aside from the snarky bit about it being for their convenience...that's all me).

So, we all feeling the pressure, but we're doing it to each other. I don't want to feel overwhelmed by my 300 emails (plus everything else) every day, but I can't stop sending out emails, or Tweeting, or sending that SMS to someone.

So I can see that we have a volume issue to deal with, but maybe it's not just the volume. After all, reading 300 work emails feels different than 100 tweets, 100 status updates, and 10 Skype conversations. Why? Because they're important and urgent. Whatever the problem is, it (at least in the mind of the email author) needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Therein lies the larger problem. Volume is still an issue, but the other kind of volume...the volume with which the message is conveyed is also an issue, because the meta-communication is what you think is important is not as important as what I think is important, in other words, your time is not as important as mine.

Of course that's not true; everyone's time is valuable. Coming to this realization led me to another rule: the convenience of electronic communication shouldn't enable you to treat another's time as if it's unimportant (Robert's Rule #13). Think of it as a variant of what, in American culture, is called the Golden Rule and maybe, just maybe, people will enjoy talking to you a little more.