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Why advanced users are hard to reach

I'm hearing this more often. "Oh, don't email Steve [or whoever] - he's not an email guy. You have to call him."

Or, "Steve's not really a phone guy. You have to email him."

Or more recently, "Steve is really bad with email. You have to use Facebook."

Or the most advanced, up-to-the-minute technology adopters, "Steve doesn't really do email or phone, and he turned off his Facebook account. But he does watch Twitter."

No doubt the most highly advanced among us will, soon enough, be off of Twitter, further approaching the point of not being reachable by anyone, anywhere.

If you can't manage one of your bitstreams, you abandon the entire medium. The logical conclusion is to be unable to use any digital tool.

(The irony is that some advanced users consider this a mark of distinction: they're so important busy and overloaded that they - so sorry! - can't be troubled to respond to email - or phone calls - any more. But mention them publicly on Twitter and perhaps they'll see it as it flies past.)


1 Comment:

marco — Jul 9, '10 — 6:55 PM

Honestly, if Steve does not respond appropriate, you dont need him :)

I experienced this behaviour myself while being responsible for team operations, even with experience in time management and PM.

By turning off any instant messaging, rush enquiries almost stopped instantly, too.

A short phone call can save hours of mail time with huge distribution lists, too, especially while initiating a new topic.

After that, you can easily switch back to mail for 'filling the gaps' and admin the work packages.

Most digital tools like sharepoint are just a huge time wasters for projet teams as a whole, we usually use dedicated staff to set up/convert/manage documentation.


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