This article originally appeared in The Tennessean.
Busy … busy … busy.
For those of us old enough to remember, before the days of email, voice mail, and online chat, there was something that at the time, we all dreaded, “the busy signal.”
The busy signal was the jarring intermittent sound you would hear on old-school landline phones when you called someone, and they were busy talking to someone else. It sounded like a repeating buzzer that instantly told you to hang up and try back later.
For a 12-year-old boy trying to call his very first girlfriend every night after school, this evil sound was a nightmare. I remember spending hours dialing and redialing only to be rejected by a tone that basically said, “I’m busy talking to someone else. … You’re not important to me. … I’m busy talking to someone else,” over and over again. Thanks to the busy signal, the relationship never got off the ground as I never had a chance to exhibit my charms, and I was crushed.
Eventually, the busy signal was made obsolete by “call-waiting,” an alert that allowed people to flip over to an incoming call even if they were busy talking to someone else. This helped my middle school dating attempts (until caller ID came along allowing a potential date to screen my call and reject me outright).
But oddly enough, as an adult, in the hustle and bustle of technology that allows us to communicate instantly, here and there I have somehow found myself missing the busy signal.
With my trusty smartphone always at my side, even when I’m busy, like most everyone else I am available. Whether I’m in a meeting, at a movie, or even at home sleeping, I can always find a way to respond to a text, answer an email, or pick up the phone.
For the most part, I have found this level of accessibility for both myself and others to be a good thing. It’s not always easy, but whether I need information from a coworker, or they need information from me, all of this modern technology has made communication extremely efficient.
But still, there are some days that this accessibility makes me feel overwhelmed.
The other day, I found myself on a conference call, texting, and answering email simultaneously. (Hey, at least I wasn’t driving.) I knew in the back of my mind that I’d fallen into a multitasking vortex, but it was just so temptingly easy to do.
The conference call, the email, and the text were all equally important to me, but I soon realized I had taken on too much at once and was doing a poor job at all three. I ended up missing an important detail of the call, sending an email full of typos, and sending a text message that caused the recipient to text back, “Huh?”
So, as much as the old-school busy signal annoyed me in the past, I have begun to see that it served an important purpose. It forced us all to take on one conversation at a time, whether we liked it or not.
Once call-waiting came along, and the busy signal became passe’, I was happy. But I didn’t realize then what I do now. Technology’s knack for reducing communication boundaries puts the burden on each of us to set our own boundaries.
This can be a quite a challenge. When tech makes it possible to communicate from anywhere at any time with anyone, how do you know when to turn on your “busy signal” yet still appear responsive to your customers’ and colleagues’ needs?
I posed this question to a few other business people who are much busier than I am to see what tricks they could impart. Not surprisingly, each of them replied with a “busy signal” of their own to let me know that they’d need a few days to answer. I will share what I learned in my next column. Stay tuned (if you’re not too busy!)
JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba. A Nashville custom software development and IT support company. Visit www.atiba.com or www.atibanetworkservices.com for more info.
