This Is My Phone Policy

Yes, I have a phone policy.

When I went to school, my his­tory teach­er once caught me check­ing my phone dur­ing class. He asked me what all slaves through­out his­tory had in common.

“That someone owned them,” I sug­ges­ted.
“That they were always avail­able,” he said.

I’ve since grown to appre­ci­ate his point.

When it comes to media chan­nels, we all have our favour­ites. For me, my phone has nev­er been one of them.

I wrote a phone policy to keep the chan­nel in check (and stay free from slavery). 

Here’s goes:

Phone Policy: Do Not Answer When

These are the situ­ations when I’m not going to answer my phone:

Phone Policy: Do Answer When

These are the situ­ations when I will answer the phone:

Phone Policy: Reply To Text Messages

Luckily, my boss says that being avail­able for unsched­uled phone calls is not part of my job descrip­tion. ¹My boss? That would be me.

Is there a poten­tial crisis?
Send me a text message:

“Jerry. Code red. Can you make your­self avail­able for a quick call?”

If you’re my cli­ent and send me a text like that, I’ll be in DEFCON 1.

Still, I’ve got­ten the occa­sion­al snarky remark due to this phone policy:

“Jerry. I called you but did­n’t answer, so I took my busi­ness elsewhere.”

Not a problem.

We should­n’t work togeth­er if someone thinks my expert­ise is eas­ily replaced. There’s no rela­tion­ship, no foundation. 

It’s a pre­sumptive prob­lem that sorts itself out, one could say.

PR Resource: Pavlov’s Inbox

Pavlov’s Inbox

Pavlov’s Inbox is an email sys­tem built around the idea that your inbox prob­lems can­not be solved by more effi­ciently pro­cessing email (e.g. Inbox Zero and sim­il­ar sys­tems). Such sys­tems will only reward unfa­vour­able sender behaviours.

Pavlov’s Inbox sys­tem assumes that you can influ­ence the beha­viours of those send­ing you emails — through conditioning.

• You reward email senders you favour by reply­ing swiftly and doing as much work as possible.
• You pun­ish email senders you loathe by politely push­ing work back to where it came from.

Pavlov’s Inbox sys­tem is based on psy­cho­lo­gic­al ideas on how to reward and pun­ish email beha­viours in a socially viable man­ner (being rude as “pun­ish­ment” might only be det­ri­ment­al to your pro­fes­sion­al repu­ta­tion).

The oper­at­ing prin­ciple of Pavlov’s Inbox is to a) reward favour­able types of emails by min­im­ising the amount of work required by the sender and b) pun­ish unfa­vour­able emails by max­im­ising the amount of work required by the sender.

Read more: Pavlov’s Inbox: The Psychological Way to Tame Your Email

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