by Serguey Shinder
I was proud of it, which is the part I find hardest to write down. I answered messages within two minutes. Not most of them. All of them, from anybody, all day, and I thought of this as a quality I had rather than a setting I had chosen.
The arithmetic I had been carrying in my head was about typing. Forty-odd messages in a week, a median reply of two sentences, call it twenty-five minutes of actual work across four days. Against that, being the person who always answers seemed obviously worth it.
The number I had never put beside it was how long it took me to get back. On anything shallow it was immediate. On anything where I was holding more than one thing at once, and that is most of the work I am paid for, it was eight to fifteen minutes before I was properly back, and sometimes I never was, because the reply had reminded me of something else. Twenty-five minutes of answers were costing me something in the region of six hours a week.
The re-entry cost is well travelled ground and it is not what changed my mind. What changed my mind was a question I had never thought to ask, which was where the two minutes had come from. Nobody had asked for it. There was no expectation anywhere in the company that messages get answered in two minutes. I had invented a service level, applied it to myself, never told anybody I was doing it, and then experienced it as pressure coming from other people. When I eventually asked a few of them, the answers were all a version of the same thing, which was that they had assumed I liked being interrupted, and would have been perfectly happy with an answer that day.
There was a second effect I had not considered. Being the fastest answer in the building made me the routing table. Questions arrived that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with my being reliable, and every one I answered directly taught somebody not to go and look, so the same question came back six weeks later from someone else.
I answer in two windows now, late morning and late afternoon, and I said so out loud so people could plan around it. Anything genuinely urgent has my phone number. Answers go into the place a future person would search, then I send the link.
Response time went from two minutes to a few hours. Not one person has mentioned it.
Being available is not a virtue you either have or lack. It is a setting with a cost, and if you never choose it deliberately, you will discover that you chose it anyway, on the least considered day of your career.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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