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In the first days of my obsession with eBay, a comical aggressive message has often been added to the description of the items offered for sale: no time please.
What is it? I said to myself. It seems a little stretched. At the time, I was less knocked out and overloaded. “Chillax Mate!” Mressed the old self, perplexed by the defensive and irascible tone of these harassed sellers.
Above the same time, during an afternoon loaded in the editorial room of the FT, I was also surprised by a colleague doing something similar in person. Faced with the conversational advances of a hack colleague telling him a problem, he simply rejected the approach.
“I just don’t have the bandwidth,” he said firmly. He actually held a helping hand to keep them away and continued his own work. Wow, I thought. Pority but effective – and probably quite masculine too.
Lately, I thought about the reaction of the Miranda of yesteryear. I noticed how the others set limits with ages. It struck me as rude. But I have not seen that it would be for a phenomenon against which it is wise to protect you: things that take your time when you don’t have enough.
Now it’s different. E-mails and SMS have been, since these innocent times, joined by WhatsApp groups and social media notifications that make work messages a 24-hour marathon. Taking care of elderly parents has created an administrator tsunami, to which the school of my children stacked a heavy portion of crazy applications to communicate, separately, duties absences.
It’s a whole colossal faff. And I’m not alone. A recent survey has revealed that the British spend 1.52 billion hours as a nation on the administrator each year and that it burns a big hole in our productive time – not to mention us also accelerating digital exhaustion.
The most affected are women at the mature age – probably because we take care of the administrator on behalf of young people and old people. Does it make me better know that my overtaking is typical? Maybe not-I’m not sure there is number safety if they indicate the hours of time on this nonsense. To quote Peter Finch Network: I’m angry like hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.
What is the solution? According to Cal Newport and other prophets to recover your resources for what matters, it is better to deactivate everything. Just retire – emails, social media and whole digital enchilada. Perhaps defining a bounce message, but don’t promise to read it all. Life is there while waiting for you to live it, and work also needs you for well stuck, without distractions.
Most of us, however, have the luxury of disappearing even for a day. The impossibility of really disconnecting gives rise to suggestions by DROLLS on social media to manage a reception box by curved email. How about a weekly ballot to choose one that gets an answer, the rest is deleted? If only!
But there is a better approach. It even worked for me for a few years, until the digital assault is collected. Just do what is urgent. Learn to discern things that really need your attention and manage them immediately. I would recommend this on the tyranny of tasks lists, where medium -term tasks become terrible psychological charges.
In the information industry, this is the norm. Follow now, make this phone call, note the fucking thing, find the information and transmit it. Then you go to the following task. When people immerse themselves in an editorial room, it is unusually irritating. More than that, it seems a little confronted – hence the refusal of my colleague to engage all these years ago.
And who really had the worst ways in this exchange? It is something to which I have returned. Now I think that setting limits is entirely necessary. This does not mean that I would dare to tell a colleague that I do not have the bandwidth, especially because women should be more beautiful.
But I will certainly be less thoughtless as to the time of others. There is no longer any response to an answer to unnecessary messages, like the one I sent to the editor-in-chief of this column with the silly joke on the ballots by e-mail. There is nothing wrong with sharing a little lightness in the working day. But there is nothing wrong with ignoring it. As she wisely did. “No Lasters please!”
Miranda.green@ft.com
