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In the early days of my obsession with eBay, a comically offensive message was added to the description of items offered for sale. Timewaster please.
What is it? I told myself. It sounds a bit slurping. At the time, I was overstretched so uncontrollably. “Twink mate!” I tweeted about my old me. I was confused by the defensive, sloppy tone of these harassed sellers.
At about the same time, on a busy afternoon in the FT Newsroom, I was surprised by a colleague doing something similar. Faced with advances in conversation that fellow Hucks tell him about the issue, he simply refused to approach.
“I don’t have any bandwidth,” he firmly stated. He actually raised his hands and did his own job to drive them away. Wow, I thought. It’s ruthless but effective, and perhaps very male.
Recently I have been thinking about how Miranda reacted last year. I was aware of how others set boundaries. I thought that was rude. But I have not seen it tackling the phenomenon of being wise to protect yourself: what takes your time when you don’t have enough of it.
It’s different now. Email and SMS messages have been a 24-hour marathon since these innocent times, with WhatsApp groups and social media notifications added to stay at the top of work messages. The administrator, who cared for older parents, has been piling up a bunch of crazy apps that my children’s schools communicate everything from homework to vaccinations and absences separately.
It’s all a huge faf. And I’m not alone. Recent polls have found that Brits spend 1.52 billion hours as managers each year, burning a big hole in productive times.
The worst affected were middle-aged women. Perhaps because we are taking care of the managers on behalf of Young and the elderly. Does it make you feel better knowing that my overwhelm is typical? Probably not – if you show the time spent on this nonsense, you don’t know if there is a number safe. Quote Peter Finch on the network: I’m angry like hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.
What is the solution? According to the prophets that Cal Newport and other prophets will reclaim your resources for what is important, it is best to turn it all off. Opt out of email, social media and digital enchilada as a whole. You may set up a bounceback message, but don’t promise to read it. Life is waiting for you to live it, and work requires you to get stuck properly without distraction.
But most of us don’t have the luxury of disappearing even for a day. It is impossible to truly log off, so there are drawl suggestions on social media about how to manage your inbox for inflated emails. How about weekly votes to choose what to get replies, will the rest be removed? If so!
But there is a better approach. It worked for me for several years until the digital onslaught gathered power. Just do something urgent. Learn how to identify what actually requires your attention and deal with them immediately. I recommend this over to to-do list tyranny where medium-term tasks can be a scary psychological burden.
This is the standard in the news industry. Follow up now, make that call, write down the damn thing, find and hand it over. Next, navigate to the next task. When people are in the newsroom, it’s extraordinarily exciting. More than that, it seems a bit like a f-humiliation – therefore my colleagues have refused to be involved many years ago.
And who had worse manners in that exchange? This is what I’ve returned to. Now I think it’s entirely necessary to set boundaries. That doesn’t mean daring me to tell my colleagues that I don’t have the bandwidth, especially since women are expected to be better.
But I certainly don’t think much about the era of others. No more expecting a response to meaningless messages, such as those sent to the editors of this column, as stupid jokes about email voting. There’s no problem sharing a little lightness on business days. But there’s no problem ignoring it either. Just like she did it wisely. “I won’t ask you to do Timewest!”
miranda.green@ft.com
