Proper Channels

We often do a bad job of telling other people how to communicate with us.

In the modern era, there are so many ways to get in touch with someone, whether at work or in your personal life. And I see people frequently get frustrated by the way other people use those channels, never realizing that they’re the ones creating the situation.

Here’s a simple example: At work, people can email you or they can use some kind of chat function like Teams or Slack. Those two options exist in most companies – plus, of course, picking up the phone or coming to see you in person if that’s an option. And folks will constantly complain about “meetings that could have been emails” or email chains that should be chat messages or chat messages that would be better resolved as a call, etc.

But… have you told people how to do that stuff? Do they know what things you’d prefer to resolve in a chat versus an email versus a meeting?

I know one professional who started a group chat with his team called “Emergencies.” He leaves the notifications on for that one, and off for everything else. And it takes so much stress off his plate! Many professional managers I know obsessively check their chats and emails every five minutes because anything could be an emergency, but most of the hundreds of messages they get in a week aren’t. But not this guy! He’s able to do real deep work and only check his messages a few times a day, because he took the radical step of actually explaining the proper channel for urgent matters.

Take the time to explain to people how you’d like to be connected. You can even put automatic responses in various channels directing them to other ones. In your email, you could put an auto-response up that says something like “Hello, I check my email twice a day to avoid distractions. For matters more urgent than that, feel free to reach me on my cell phone.” That simple adjustment will give people peace of mind that a non-response from you isn’t a problem, and give you peace of mind that you aren’t missing anything urgent when you want to actually focus.

This is a small intervention, but it pays dividends. Try it out!