Ask not for whom the phone rings: it rings for thee - Workstyles - Column

Home Office Computing, March, 1993 by Nick Sullivan

Office workers who get bogged down by meetings and interruptions often take their work home for a day or two. If you call their office, you're told that so-and-so is "working at home today." End of conversation. Please do not disturb. It's as if they've gone to some monastery in the Himalayas.

But if you work at home full-time, or close to it, you get no such respect. A few years ago, callers used to apologize for "disturbing" me in my home office. Office colleagues apologized for giving out my home number, as if I were in a monastery. I said, "No problem, this is my office, this is where I work, feel free to call anytime." I wanted to be connected to the world of commerce.

Now, I get the same incessant phone calls I'd get in any old office. Even though I don't have people walking into my office, it's still hard to carve out a quiet block of time. I could ignore phone calls and sometimes do, but I find it hard to resist picking up the cradle. Plus, it's easier to answer a call than to return it later. The problem, of course, is that some phone calls go on ad nauseum.

So now I'm always looking for a way to turn my home office back into the refuge from the modern world it once was. Not all the time, of course. Just when I really need a chunk of time to concentrate.

One day, when I was talking on one line, a call came in on the other. The ringing bothered me and presumably the person I was talking to, so I shut off the ringer by flicking the switch on the side of the phone. The answering machine picked up and silently took a message.

I worked for a few hours without getting any more calls, wondering if everyone had simultaneously lost my phone number. Then I sauntered by the answering machine to see that I had four messages. I had not heard the phone ring or seen the light flash. How pleasant! Like the tree that falls unheard in the forest, the phone that tings unheard hasn't really rung. If it hasn't rung, why should I feel bad about not picking it up? How's that for pop philosophy?

Lately, I've succumbed to another old trick that is so low and cowardly it makes me question my own mental toughness: monitoring calls on the answering machine. To me, it's like playing God, deciding who's worth your time. Nonetheless, call monitoring does have its advantages. I've already avoided several potentially long or unpleasant phone calls. It makes me wonder if I should really switch to voice mail, as has been my intention, because it won't allow call monitoring.

Let me back up one second, before I sound like an isolate who thinks his time is worth more than yours. The problem, as I'm sure you know, is that one really long phone call, or a string of calls on unrelated topics, can totally destroy any chance of focusing on one project long enough to finish it. If your mind's all over the map, it's hard to find the You ARE HERE sign. And that's where I want to be--fight here, fight now--not hither and yon at the whim of phone callers.

To effectively shut out the world for an extended period of time, I find you have to make a conscious decision early in the day. Otherwise, you slowly get sucked into everyone else's karass, the term Kurt Vonnegut used in Cat's Cradle to describe a metaphorical web that connects people and things to each other.

I can also see the day when I will escape the office altogether, to seek the peace and quiet office workers enjoy when they take an occasional day at home. I'll take a notebook computer to another part of the house, outside, or to the library. When my work is done, I can return to the office to face the music--of the ringing phone.