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“Use the Caller ID and voicemail
the phone company gave you, and
the brain God gave you, to keep
pests from wasting your valuable
time.”
Glenn Shepard
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Dear Glenn,
Our office manager has
implemented a program where we're all supposed to do
something as a company after work once a month, to
improve morale.
Sounds
great, but during working hours I'm ignored/talked down
to/treated like garbage on a daily basis by this manager
as well as other employees. I've never encountered this
much animosity at a job before.
I did this "company outing" routine once, and felt like
I was in back in high school, so it really didn't
improve my morale. How can I get my point across to this
manager that I'm really not interested in doing this
stuff? Eight hours a day with these people is enough.
Jean in
Portland, OR
Dear
Jean,
Forget about the after
hours activities.
If
you're that miserable at your job, YOU need to take
control of YOUR life and find a better place to
work.
Life's too short, and there's still plenty of
opportunity out there for people willing to look hard
enough to find it, or create their own.
Thanks for your question.
Glenn in Nashville, TN
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Glenn's Personal Blog
Click on the gold
pen to see what Glenn's on a
rant about now |
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Prior to
the 1980’s, people who had to be on call on their days off
were tied to wherever hardwired telephone lines were available.
Then came cell phones, which provided a previously unheard-of
amount of freedom.
But
nowadays, some
people have turned that same invention
into a form of what some therapists call electronic slavery. The
dictionary defines slavery as “a system in which people are the
property of others”.
Cell phone
addicts have inadvertently given others
ownership of their most valuable asset – their time – by allowing them to interrupt it
anytime they choose, and take as much as they want
These
electronic addicts know
no other way of life other than being accessible 24/7.
The problem
is that this not only allows constant
interruptions, it invites them.
I’m not
talking about the doctor who receives an emergency call during
dinner, or the IT professional who has to leave a movie to get a
system back up for a customer.
I’m talking
about calls that are often unimportant, unnecessary, and even
unwanted.
Dr. Edward
Hallowell says that the reason cell phone addicts answer every
call is because they get a squirt of dopamine in
their brain when the phone rings, much like Pavlov’s dogs
hearing a bell.
And he
should know.
Dr.
Hallowell is a psychiatrist and author of over a dozen books,
including Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap
- Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD.
To see how
some people have turned into mind-numbed robots who exercise no
discretion when their phone rings, notice how they'll answer a call in the middle of a movie,
only to say “I can’t talk right
now. Let me call you back”.
It’s never
occurred to them to let voice-mail pick up. It's as if they
turned their brains off when they turned their cell phones on.
While
turning a cell phone off may not be practical for some folks,
everyone needs to set personal boundaries.
Even if you
have to be accessible at all times, this does NOT mean you have
to be accessible to everybody, whenever they want to
talk, for anything they want to talk about.
It’s your
life and your time, so take control of it.
Use the
Caller ID and voicemail the phone company gave you, and the
brain God gave you, to keep unwanted pests from wasting your valuable
time.
To Your Success,
This article is copyrighted
material and may not be reproduced without permission. It is
excerpted from Glenn’s new program
“Time Management Skills for Busy Professionals: New Edition for
2010”, scheduled for release in August 2010.
Click here to
comment
on today's issue.
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