My (Unorthodox) Productivity Resolution For This Year — Be Less ‘Responsive’!

So the new year has rolled around and with it will inevitably follow a slew of ‘My Top Resolutions’ posts on social media, LinkedIn, and the other usual fora through which we issue and consume social commentary these days.

Without wishing to — as one of my writer friends likes to put it — “contribute more banality to a world and internet already bathing in it”, I decided it would be worth contributing my productivity resolution (going to the gym is already up there!) simply because it is perhaps more original and contrarian than the ones that many are fixing for themselves.

For the past six months or so, I have been engaging in a slow but deliberate process of gradually becoming less ‘responsive’ — and finding myself both happier and (paradoxically) more productive as a result.

The first small manifestation of this push was removing WhatsApp from the drawer of my home screen of my Android.

I reckoned that — given that I type at about 110 Words Per Minute (WPM) — attempting to awkwardly pick at a virtual keyboard (or worse, dispatch voice notes!) was an unconscionably poor use of my time.

Nowadays, I access WhatsApp almost exclusively via Rambox which is just about my favorite program, bar an internet browser, on my desktop.

Because (change two spoiler!) I have begun limiting my communication ‘scans’ to hourly, or three hourly, swoops, the average amount of time it takes me to respond to a WhatsApp messages has skyrocketed from an average of about three minutes to an average of about three hours.

And, guess what — the sky hasn't fallen and I haven’t experience a decrease in quality of life as a result.

However, although I am very satisfied with the changes that I have instituted in the six months since I embarked upon this project, I am also an ardent believer in the concept of Kaizen (continuous improvement) — and am currently lapping up One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer PhD. I thoroughly recommend it as an accessible and straightforward guide to what — despite its unusual Japanese name — does not need to be an abstruse topic.

With that in mind, here are some of the various small changes I have made to date, their rationale, and what effect they have had on my overall productivity.

But first, a public service announcement (PSA).

Being Unresponsive Is Definitely Not The Flavor of the Day — And, If You're Self-Employed, It May Cost You Clients

As I continue in my move against responsiveness, I must quickly point out the obvious.

We live in a world that positively fetishizes connectivity, productivity, and responsiveness. Running counter to that trend inevitably incurs consequences.

Last year, we saw the first hopeful glimmerings of pushback against much of this — some of it from surprising quarters, such as from startup founders themselves who are increasingly going public about some seemingly perplexing decisions given their vocation, such as banning their own children from owning smartphones.

The dangers and deficits of hyper-responsiveness have unfortunately been less threshed out (if I’m wrong about that, please send me reading material). But I predict that this subject will be the next agenda item up for discussion.

Besides the societal pressure to be ‘responsive’ that we mercilessly and egregiously inflict upon one another, one needn’t look far to find examples of UI copy and functionalities that subtly attempts to shame us into being constantly subservient to our inboxes and notification displays, ideally batting off replies within mere minutes of their receipt.

Just consider the metric (the average response time) that Facebook now presents to those that message a page.

If it serves an ostensibly good purpose, it is, perhaps, to help user set realistic expectations about when they might be most likely to expect a response from a page they have messaged — and to help them determine when it might be prudent to either start badgering them again, pick up the phone to call the business or... you know... be old fashioned about it and just physically walk onto their premises (if that is even a possibility).

More nefariously, however, I believe that the functionality subtly shames business owners that are not glued to their devices and are instead busy running and optimizing their companies away from Facebook. As they should be!

In the eyes of many, if not most, customers, messaging a business which draws the bot response “This business typically replies within one day” sets it at an immediate disadvantage versus a competitor who might respond, according to the auto-response “within a few minutes.”

But there are many more responsiveness-pushers out there than Facebook.

As a writer-for-hire with a predilection for technology (no, that’s not a sales pitch!) my work invariably brings me into close contact with plenty of startups, particularly those based, where I live, in Israel.

As I am currently engaging in some outbound sales prospecting to fill up my book of business for the coming business quarter, I have been engaging in countless telephone calls, Zoom conferences, and GoToMeetings. So much, in fact, that I had to block off an entire day recently just to give my voice box a rest.

Like many, I use the excellent Calendly to streamline the process of booking these meetings, allowing my prospects to automatically book a 15 minute slot on my calendar.

However, in order to prevent over-booking my schedule and having to jump chaotically from one call to the next without giving myself proper time to engage in proper due diligence beforehand (namely refreshing on my prospect’s website and value proposition; evaluating their marketing collateral; and preparing to discuss what I could offer them), I recently decided to enforce some of the features presented by Calendly’s “advanced settings” tab.

These are:

• I set a minimum scheduling notice of 2 business days (48 hours). That makes it impossible for prospects to book time on my calendar on the same day.
• I set event buffers of 30 minutes for before and after each appointment to prevent overrun, and, again, avoid general scheduling chaos.

The response to this has been fascinating to observe.

On one end of the spectrum, companies (probably those I would be a good fit for) have scheduled calls anywhere from 7 days to 3 weeks ahead of time.

This I found encouraging and surprising. 

Color me a contrarian yet again, but I’m instantly impressed by a company that wants to move that slowly with the process of hiring a writer-on-contract. 

I know that they’re not in a frantic rush to produce content for the sake of producing content (never a good idea) and that they, and I, are going to have time to properly prepare ourselves for the conversation and evaluate whether this is reasonably likely to be a good fit going forward.

On the other of the spectrum, I have received countless permutations of the following.

I won’t say which country the senders are typically based in but, if you live in the same country as I do, you can probably guess the answer:

• “There’s a bug in your Calendly. It wouldn’t let me book a call in an hour.”
• “We couldn’t speak today so I’m not interested. We would need somebody who is ultra-responsive for this role.”
• “ I called three times this morning. You didn’t call back.”
• “Hi, did you get my email from ten minutes ago? Can you call now?”

My intention here is not to alienate people, companies, or a predominant working culture — but rather to point out that companies’ approaches to responsiveness and scheduling actually vary rather enormously. 

For anybody, like me, that places high value on the concepts of flow state and focus time, this is great news. It means that—despite ultra-responsiveness feeling like as basic a requirement for attracting prospects as having a LinkedIn profile — there are, in fact plenty of companies that are likely to be ‘good fits’ for us to work with.

My second point is that — for those, like me, in the trenches of designing sales funnels — a client’s expectations surrounding responsiveness can be a worthwhile criterion to enforce in your lead qualification process.

I have had my fair share of clients that call repeatedly on the weekends despite firm requests not to (pro tip: buy a second SIM card and have a business-only line!;); clients that call to communicate every little detail involved in a project including simply to say “we liked the draft you sent”; and clients that bombard me with dozens of emails, walking me through exactly the same onboarding process that they do for an in-house staff member.

None of these clients were a good fit for me then. Nor would they be now.

But another writer might get a kick out of being always ‘in the game’ and ‘connected’. And for another writer again, they might be a ‘necessary evil’ while they try to find better work and less demanding clients.

In other words, rather than framing lack of responsiveness as an automatic deficiency, I think it’s time we celebrated the fact that companies and individuals can have wildly varying working styles. I think that this, in fact, makes for a functioning and vibrant marketplace in the provision of at-will labor.

But, until you’re clear on your own feelings about responsiveness and know which boundaries you’re comfortable enforcing, such sales and prospecting encounters might be a difficult tango to dance.

But firstly:

You might be wondering why I see value in being less responsive. And what I mean when I talk about ‘unresponsiveness’.

I’ll address both of these points in turn.

Above: My haven of productivity / non-responsiveness

1: Why Be Less Responsive

As a writer (with an added measure of sound sensitivity — and here I must pause to point out that this might be a sign of genius!) focus rather than time is my most precious commodity which I vigorously try to guard.

Like many writers, I tend to work in fast and furious spurts of creativity.

But this requires getting into a flow state first.

For me, this typically requires:

• The ingestion of large quantities of coffee. Ideally extremely potent dark demitasse cups of Turkish coffee — no sugar or milk for me!
• The sound of nature, the sound of me furiously hammering on my keyboard, my beloved white noise machine, Brain.fm, or all of these simultaneously.

Obstacles in this pursuit are:

• Random / unscheduled phone calls;
• Random / unscheduled delivery people showing up to the door;
• WhatsApp messages and notifications pinging me every fifteen seconds;
• Emails;
• Other random interruptions;
• The sound of screaming babies, “Happy Birthday to [Customer’s Name]” sung every five minutes, and other auditory affronts from the restaurant near where I work.

Over the course of long years spent getting to better understand my own work habits, I have come to understand that if I can have the features of List A and not List B I can:

• Spin out posts such as this—without any spelling or grammar errors— in an hour or two and in one or two drafts;
• Comfortably get through $500 worth of billable work in time for lunch.

But, if I have the features of List B but not List A:

• I make uncharacteristic spelling and grammar errors simply because my focus is divided between trying to focus on what I am writing and trying to mentally filter the distraction I‘m encountering. This always astounds me and is my proof to myself that the phenomenon I'm trying to explain here is real;
• I struggle to get through any billable work.

So for me being less responsive and limiting my email / social media checking to three hour intervals helps me be more productive and actually makes me money.

Do I have undiagnosed ADD? Possibly!

Misphonia? Almost certainly.

But personally, I’d rather check my email less frequently than take amphetamine pills.

2: What I Consider Being ‘Less Responsive’ / Operating At Minimal Acceptable Responsiveness (MAR)

I’m fond of inventing unnecessary acronyms, so let’s call the lowest amount of responsiveness that you can get away with in your line of work, or in your job, your Minimal Acceptable Responsiveness — or MAR.

Your MAR will depend upon who your clients are, what you do for a living, and other factors that might be outside of your control — such as your boss’s expectations surrounding how quickly you should get back to email.

But what’s a good ballpark, you might be wondering?

Thankfully, somebody’s done the research — and there’s lots of it, all of which can be easily found online.

Some key findings:

• Fifty percent of emails are responded to within two hours;
• Ninety percent of people will respond to an email within one or two business days.

Above: My Rambox tabs. From left to right: MySMS, Todoist (custom service), WhatsApp x 3, Google Contacts (custom service), Skype, Facebook Messenger. Franz and Station offer similar functionality.

Thus, I have set myself the following rules:

• Scan through Rambox every three hours at most. This covers all communication channels, the most important, of course, being email.
• Always get back to clients for non-urgent matters within the same business day.

As I move towards my MAR, I have developed some eccentricities. These include apologizing unnecessarily when I issue an immediate response. “Hey, I was right in front of my inbox when this came in!” is my usual opener. I’m sure some correspondents have been confused by this.

But otherwise, as I mentioned, I’ve found it to be both a valuable means of heightening my own productivity and of unintentionally self-selecting for the type of clients I am going to have the easiest time working for.

MAR Kaizen: Interventions So Far

To conclude this post (because, you know, I really need to actually read my inbox again!) I will list out the other interventions intended to reduce distraction and heighten productivity. All of these are fairly new to me (as in, they have been instituted within the past year), and thus all are still under evaluation:

I started using flight mode liberally — (when not in an airplane, that is)

If I don’t have any calls scheduled and am not waiting on any deliveries, I know that it is safe to disconnect.

I actually picked this tip up from a worker at a yoga store in Tel Aviv when I asked her if they sold any physical meditation timers such as this one.

When she asked why, I explained that I loved ZenTime (now retired from Google Play, but there are countless alternatives) but that I couldn’t properly get into a meditation session with the threat of phone calls and notifications constantly at the back of my mind.

“Just go into flight mode,” she enthused — entirely unaware that she was actually conveying some of the most helpful advice I have ever received.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I bought an intercom for my home office.

Despite all the foregoing, I believe that having some means of connectivity with the outside world is a matter of personal safety.

I would never be without a telephone, for example.

I bought an intercom in my home office just to always have some means of quickly communicating with another human.

Above: My Google account settings on my Android

3. I stopped syncing email to my phone and stopped using it to browse the internet.

As I mentioned, I’m a fast typist.

I’m also a desktop fanatic and the proud owner of a custom-built PC with three (soon to be five!) monitors which runs a Linux distribution that I have modified for my own needs.

For me, this is productivity heaven.

My Android is not and to top it all off I believe that most mobile still leg far behind their UIs intended to be accessed from a laptop or desktop.

I’ve simply concluded that it’s more time efficient for me to check my inbox from my desktop — or my laptop when travelling. And to do all web browsing from the same device.

Incidentally, this process has shown me how ridiculously tightly Google locks down Android devices, preventing users from taking perfect reasonable actions like uninstalling the Chrome browser, which are installed on a system partition that non-root users cannot modify. Installing Ubuntu Touch, or rooting my phone, is now on my to-do list as a result.

4. I installed Calendly on my website and insisted on scheduling business calls—rather than having contacts call me ad-hoc.

As above, some prospects have been incensed by this decision and demanded or attempted to speak immediately.

I have simply made peace with their outrage.

5. I added a WhatsApp Autoresponder message to WhatsApp Business and diplomatically (I hope) asked clients to please stop sending me files and random snippets of information over WhatsApp and to collect their musings and put them into an email instead.

This, in turn, streamlines my scanning process as I know that business activity will be clustered in my inbox and that WhatsApp is likely to contain mostly, or preferably entirely, social/personal conversations.

***

Minimum Responsiveness Works!

True to the kaizen philosophy, this list is not intended as an exhaustive run-through of everything one can do to be less ‘interrupted’.

In fact, the inspiration to post this actually came from small changes that I instituted this very morning (namely: putting Chrome behind an app-blocker on my phone — it’s designed to make it harder for me to check the browser and break the habit of checking Google News, with its slew of usually depressing and almost entirely un-actionable information, while in bed).

Rather, achieving a level of responsiveness and dis-connectivity that works for me and my business is a work in progress.

I encourage anybody reading this to think critically about where our current culture of ultra-responsiveness is taking us as a society — and mentally as humans.

About how it is (literally) rewiring our brain and altering our neurochemistry to become relentless seekers of the tiny dopamine hits we get whenever we (unnecessarily) check our inbox for the third time in five minutes. Or when we receive another like on Facebook.

I believe that anxiety around being perceived as ‘unresponsive’ — which is entirely justified, as if anything my experience has taught me that being so has tangible consequences — is a major driver, possibly even the central one, of this collective dis-ease.

And that, consequentially, it’s our collective duty to attempt to change this.

As the human:technology interface continues to evolve, I am willing to predict that we will all become progressively more mindful about our relationship to the devices we carry in our pockets, which sit on our bedsides, and occupy space on our workstations.

As we do so, I hope we can move towards a healthier professional culture.

One that encourages periodic disconnection; which understands many humans’ innate need to initiate and maintain flow states both to be happy and to do our best work; which does not demand that email be responded to before the sender has finished their morning coffee; and which does not infer that Facebook Page managers who do not live in front of their computers are being unacceptably ‘unresponsive’ to the needs of their customers.

All these measures, large and small, serve to perpetuate our current work culture — which I believe is an unsustainable one.

Such a rethink, as mentioned, will need to come from our society as a whole.

But I believe that resolving, as individuals, to reshape the culture of hyper-responsiveness can only be a positive first step.

I encourage anyone reading this to consider taking it.