20 years ago, when I started working, a business typically had one or two phone lines and, that was it. There was no fax machines, there were no cellular phones, pages, email, blackberries. Executives relied on their pen and paper calendar, and another person that they referred to as a secretary. My first employer, after high school, had a telex. If I recall correctly there was one person in the office responsible to sending and receiving messages with it. The terminals that lined some areas of the offices were connected to mainframes – they really looked very important. Email, except in closed environments, didn’t exist.

In the early 90′s I sat in front of my first PC when I took a job with a real estate company in Calgary. It ran DOS and had only one program on it. It was a Word Processor. Soon afterwards Windows came out and replaced the first PC. This was the first time that our computers were ‘crudely’ networked.

As time goes, pagers made us more accessible to our employers through the 80′s and 90′s. Early cellular phones were in brief cases, cost prohibitive for most, and used only in rarely good service areas. In the mid 90′s cellular phones were being carried, as I recall, by management level personnel and above. By the mid 90′s the Internet and email started to take hold. Some companies had difficulty understanding, in these early days, that resistance was futile. In the very short years to follow, corporate email became a standard in communications. It was in this span of time that companies started laying off administrative support staff and receptionists, in favour of managers doing their own typing of letters, memos and other documents.

Today the PDA, or a Blackberry, has replaced the paper agenda and the cell phone (in some cases). Cellular phones are common place now. Almost everyone I know carries a personal or business cell phone. Some people are giving up their home phones and just relying on their cellular. Everyone, except my Father, has an email address. Some of us have multiple email accounts. The sending and receiving of faxes is on the decline. Most every form of communication we use today can easily fit on a belt.

So here we are, today, 2008, and we are almost too accessible. Somewhere along the line of advancement in communications, we have become a society that is demanding this degree of connectivity from our service providers and partners. Some time in the past decade I have lost the ability to sense a phone vibrating on my hip – apparently so has the guy in the restaurant who has the fancy music play instead of a subtle ring tone.

Along with the ability to send instant messages, short text, email and voice messages, some people have become accustomed to an instant response. It was easy to respond to email and phone messages when there was only five per day. Now that we are all connected, it is not uncommon to receive dozens of messages and calls per day. Some people receive hundreds of ‘contacts’ per day.

Unfortunately, as we were all getting connected and becoming so accessible, we have taught everyone to expect an instant response.

How did we manage business before we taught everyone to expect an instant response? It is time to slow down and find balance between great service and responding to every email and phone call as if we were an emergency service.

I’d love it if you would share with me any tips or tricks you employ to manage the constant flow of inbound communication in your business and personal life. I have some good tools in place, but am going to leave that for another entry.

Cheers,

David A. West

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