What’s the point of communications technology if we don’t use it?
I’m sure we’ve all experienced something like this: you need to get a hold of someone because something important has come up, and you have a variety of ways that person has provided you to do it. You send emails. You call. You text. And, you get no reply. Whatever it is you needed to talk to that person about passes by.
Now, you are stressed.
This problem is especially aggravating when we really need to get in touch with someone like a relative, an employer, or a professor. Sometimes it really can be a matter as serious as life and death.
Now, granted, we live in an era where we are bombarded by a never ending flow of communications from an ever-greater number of sources, but what is the point of having all of these ways of communicating if we do not use them? I do not think that the problem is that there are too many ways to communicate, so much as it is that we make far too many commitments to communicate without ever really thinking about whether we will.
This question of whether or not we will communicate is most important in professional settings where people are trying to contact us for the purpose of the goods or services we may provide to others. Being available as quickly as possible by the means we communicate can make the difference between succeeding or failing at what we do.
The solution is to be honest with people about how we will communicate. It is not wrong to tell people that it may take awhile for us to respond to e-mails or that we do not answer our phones most of the time so they should leave a message. It is not wrong to put in a voicemail message that it may take us a day to respond or to have an email auto-reply that says when someone can expect a response.
If the people trying to communicate with us understand how we will communicate back, then we can take the stress out of our communication, and less stress would be a good thing for all of us.