Relentless Reminders Render Us Unproductive

Relentless reminders render us unproductiveThis is not your ordinary career site. I help the corporate worker who toils away in the company cubicle make career transitions. You want to do your job well, following all the rules -- .The career transitions where I can help you center on three critical career areas: How to land a job, succeed in a job, and build employment security.Top 10 Posts on CategoriesRelentless reminders â€" about our calendar, appointments, tasks â€" will overwhelm our productivity. Not just in our jobs but in our life.I have a great dentist. I’m going pay him and his firm a lot of money for work that really needs doing. But I have this issue about his service: he has relentless reminders. With an appointment, I get a text message 3 days before to confirm the appointment. I get an e-mail that does the same. If I don’t respond to the e-mail or the text message, I get a phone call reminding me of the appointment. Three reminders for something already on my cal endar. And I’ve never missed an appointment.It’s not just the dentist. It is where I have my hair cut. Where I have my doctor’s appointments. Where I have my personal calendar with events posted. It is with Outlook at my consulting gig. I can get a pop up for every time I have a new e-mail (W00T! â€" one hundred reminders a day just from e-mail!!!). I can get dinged when I have a text message â€" not just from people, but from reminders about storm warnings, snow plowing and, if I wanted, breaking news. And don’t even talk to me about Twitter or some other social media outlet.Seriously â€" count how many times you get a reminder message in a day. Ten? Forty? A hundred? The truth, now â€" no fudging. How many are you getting?Here’s where every blog post on the Internet will tell you that all these distractions are taking you away from being productive. And they will give you fifty suggestions for reducing the number of distractions â€" everything from taking that pop-up win dow off in Outlook for every time you get an e-mail message (done…) to taking two hours of uninterrupted time to work solely on your tasks (and Facebook).All of that is true.Sure, you should get rid of all the distractions that default in the time management systems of your life. But getting rid of the distractions is really not the problem.The problem is that we fail in our commitments so often that businesses and systems have to build in reminders â€" because they lose too much revenue from our poor commitment habit.I’ll give you a perfect example: a person needed to deliver a commitment to me last week on Thursday â€" it was a promise made in e-mail. Failed on Thursday. Failed on Friday. I reminded on Monday with an answer of delivery on Tuesday. On Tuesday, too much going on, so a delivery on Wednesday â€" Wednesday the person is on vacation. Hey, it’s just a week late â€" but if I didn’t have a system in place to remind me of these commitments, I never would have gotten it by Wednesday (assuming that I get it on Wednesday…).Think about it: I have to have a system set up so that I track the commitments made to me (a “waiting for” category in GTD), review them consistently to make sure they happen or remind me to remind them when they don’t, all because I can’t trust people to deliver what they say they will deliver when they say they will deliver it.Sure, get rid of all those reminders because they are distractions. They really are distractions. But when you are getting all those reminder distractions, think about what your delivery to your commitments is compared to what you promised. Did you really deliver them so you should get rid of the reminder distractions?Or do you really need all those reminders so that the most urgent thing on the planet drives you to deliver what you promised so you can get rid of all those damn distracting reminders?Do you deliver on your commitments (and I have issues as well…), or do you really need the 5, 000 reminders to get your work done?This is not your ordinary career site. I help the corporate worker who toils away in the company cubicle make career transitions. You want to do your job well, following all the rules â€" .The career transitions where I can help you center on three critical career areas: How to land a job, succeed in a job, and build employment security. policiesThe content on this website is my opinion and will probably not reflect the views of my various employers.Apple, the Apple logo, iPad, Apple Watch and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. I’m a big fan.Copyright 2020 LLC, all rights reserved.