When it Rings, Do you Answer?

I was an adult, mar­ried, career in full swing when Beryl, a co-​​worker, opened my eyes in a way that impacts my life to this day. I was vent­ing about tele­mar­keters (this was in the days before the Do Not Call list or Caller ID). I was prob­a­bly on a bit of a tirade since I pas­sion­ately dis­like being inter­rupted by tele­mar­keters any time and espe­cially dur­ing the din­ner hour.

Beryl shut me up with one sim­ple ques­tion, “Why do you answer the phone?” She went on to tell me that tele­mar­keters are not a prob­lem to her because she feels no com­pul­sion to answer a phone sim­ply because it rings.

This may  not seem sig­nif­i­cant to you, but it floored me. Until that moment, it truly had not occurred to me that I had the con­trol, that I could choose to not answer the phone; that I could choose to let the door bell ring; that I could ignore any unwanted intru­sions in my day.

If you’ve had a chance to read my e-​​book Sur­vive the Work from Home Jun­gle, you know that I am not a ²⁴⁄₇ cell phone user. And that is because I’ve cho­sen to set rules for how I will and won’t use my time.

To this day, I choose whether to answer the phone. Now of course I use caller ID. Com­bined with a good answer­ing machine, I feel no guilt at all when the phone rings and rings and rings. I can even ignore a text mes­sage. Imag­ine that!

When you work from home, the tele­phone requires some care­ful han­dling. Peo­ple have pre­con­ceived ideas ham­mered into them, like my assump­tion that I had to answer the phone because it rang. Whether your pre­con­cep­tions come from what you’ve been taught, from your friends, or from your own thoughts about your ideal office envi­ron­ment, con­sider putting aside those con­cep­tions and start­ing fresh.

Remem­ber when there were no cell phones? We actu­ally had to plan a trip, get direc­tions before we left for a meet­ing because there was no pain­less way to change mid-​​route. When we needed to talk to our team, we used the phone to set up meet­ings and then actu­ally attended meetings.

I“m not advo­cat­ing a return to those times. I like the con­ve­nience of GPS and cell phones. I like the con­ve­nience and flex­i­bil­ity and sim­plic­ity of tele­con­fer­ences. I’m sug­gest­ing that we give some thought to the way it used to be as we incor­po­rate more and more intru­sive tech­nol­ogy into our daily rou­tine. The point is we are attached to the acces­si­bil­ity of the phone and the idea that every­one should be acces­si­ble all the time. Noth­ing could, or should, be fur­ther from the truth.

It’s My Phone and it’s a Tool, not a Toy

The phone is a busi­ness tool. It’s used to con­tact clients, cus­tomers, poten­tial cus­tomers, ven­dors, sup­pli­ers, any per­son affil­i­ated with the process of doing busi­ness as you define it. It is a tool you use to com­mu­ni­cate with cus­tomers and ven­dors. That’s it. Simple.

There is a trend today to do-​​away with the land line and use only a cell phone. Every now and then I seri­ously recon­sider this option for myself. But I always come up with the same con­clu­sion: my office phone is not intended for friends and family.

I choose to use my cell phone for friends and fam­ily. My busi­ness phone is a land line. I’ve trained my clients to call the busi­ness phone, not the cell.  There is some carry over because I use the cell phone as a backup to the land line and I use it when I travel. How­ever, greater than 95% of my busi­ness calls hap­pen on my land line.

Office Hours extend to the Phone

It is espe­cially impor­tant that any­one work­ing from home pay close atten­tion to whether the phone is run­ning your office or whether you are run­ning your office. Define your oper­at­ing hours. And stick to ‘em. When your oper­at­ing hours are over, the busi­ness phone is also over. Unless you oper­ate a 24 hour ser­vice, there’s no rea­son to be on call ²⁴⁄₇.

One of my clients is a com­pany that has com­puter instruc­tors on cruise ships all around the world. Even in this sit­u­a­tion where I have clients who are lit­er­ally on the other side of the globe, I don’t take calls out­side of rea­son­able busi­ness hours – unless we sched­ule the call. If it’s really impor­tant, your client will leave a mes­sage and you can choose to respond – but don’t answer that phone after hours.

Take Con­trol of your Phone Usage

The phone is intru­sive. Answer­ing the phone is a huge dis­trac­tion. Even though I have trained myself to ignore the phone when it rings, I still often get up and go check the Caller ID to see who is call­ing. Our brains are not very smart some­times, even after we’ve retrained them.

Turn it off.

When I truly need to avoid dis­trac­tion or inter­rup­tion, I turn off the ringer or I leave the house and work at the library or Star­bucks or any­place where I can ignore the hub­bub and there is no pos­si­bil­ity of a phone call com­ing in for me.

Yes. You under­stand cor­rectly. I leave the cell phone home or turn it off. No pos­si­bil­ity of a call com­ing in for me.

Use your voice mail.

Really. For those of you who have read the Sur­vive the Work from Home Jun­gle e-​​book you know how I feel about voice mail…it is a must have item.

I don’t always answer the phone. I pre­fer to return calls. This works for me. It also work for my clients. When I choose the call­back time,  I am able to give my undi­vided atten­tion. I will have had time to pre­pare for the con­ver­sa­tion, should any prepa­ra­tion be nec­es­sary. This respects my time and my client’s time and it’s great cus­tomer service.

Use your e-​​mail.

Sounds odd, but e-​​mail is a great tool for man­ag­ing your phone usage. Let your clients know that if you are not reached right away on the phone, a quick fol­low up e-​​mail mes­sage is the best alternative.

How often do you check e-​​mail dur­ing the day? Be hon­est. Mine comes in auto­mat­i­cally all day long. If I’m at my com­puter, I see the incom­ing mes­sage flag flash across the bot­tom of the screen. I only check voice mail once or twice a day. Some days it seems like I check e-​​mail obses­sively, but not really. It’s the vol­ume of email I receive that can be overwhelming…but that’s a topic for another day.

Check out Chat.

A com­puter appli­ca­tion I use daily is Digsby. I use this to man­age mul­ti­ple ‘chat’ ‘win­dows. Chat (also called IM or Instant Mes­sag­ing) is a tool I use heav­ily to stay in touch with my home busi­ness ven­dors, busi­ness friends, as well as per­sonal friends and family.

What works about chat is that I can keep it as unob­tru­sive as I like. The mes­sage will wait until I am ready to respond and unlike the phone, there’s no annoy­ing ring­ing to inter­rupt my train of thought.

Digsby allows me to orga­nize my chat iden­ti­ties into one win­dow. Digsby actu­ally orga­nizes IM, E-​​Mail, and Social Media like Twit­ter and Face­book, if you want it to. I use it mostly for chat.

Caller ID

This is your best friend. I’ve already men­tioned that I use Caller ID. It is my favorite phone tool. It should be yours, too. Screen­ing your calls is both OK and an effi­cient use of your time.

Beryl was so right, you don’t have to answer the phone just because it is ringing.