How to Protect Your Time Without Alienating Your Network
by Dorie Clark
It’s a law of nature: The further you rise, the more people will make demands on your time. Some of those requests are self-interested: the informational interview, the job advice, the request for a connection, a recommendation letter, or angel funding. Others may be quite beneficial to you: the offer of a paid speaking engagement or a prestigious media interview opportunity or an invitation to an exclusive conference. The easy answer is to ignore all of these requests, deleting them as they come in—or even more extreme, to declare some form of email bankruptcy. But of course, that risks alienating some of your biggest advocates.
I feel genuine empathy for one top business thinker with whom I had a heart-to-heart at a conference a couple of years ago. She was overwhelmed and miserable with the amount of correspondence she received; it literally pained her. Her answer? She pretty much ignored everything, including my follow-up requests to interview her for a (very well-read) publication and, later, to endorse my forthcoming book. I know she’s busy and I like her a lot, but total silence is not the mark of a friend, or even a passing-grade acquaintance. So how can you protect your time—and accomplish your more pressing priorities—without being a jerk to allies? Here are three strategies.
Scale your time
I’m fortunate that there are plenty of people who’d like to connect with me for meals or drinks or coffee: It’s a good problem to have. The downside, of course, is that I don’t have time for every request. Yesterday, I received an email from a Wharton School student who had attended a guest lecture I’d given there 18 months ago. Very politely, he thanked me for my talk, shared how he’d been implementing my suggestions, and then asked if I could “spend 20–30 minutes on the phone for a few points” on how he might best take advantage of a new opportunity. He sounds terrific and I’d like to help, but it’s just not feasible to do this for every student who requests it. Instead, I’m going to follow a tip that tech opinion leader Robert Scoble shared with me when I interviewed him for my book Stand Out. Instead of responding to emails one at a time, Scoble asks his interlocutors to post their questions on Quora so that others can see and benefit from his responses. I won’t use Quora, but I’ll ask the student to email me his question. I’ll respond electronically and will later turn it into a blog post. Similarly, instead of one-on-one coffees, I’ll often organize dinners to bring together interesting groups of people who could also benefit from knowing one another.
Don’t overestimate your own importance
I’d been convening a series of such dinners in New York City for a number of months, bringing together authors to meet each other, make connections, talk about book marketing, and the like. When I realized a mutual friend knew one thinker I admired, I asked her to make an introduction and invited him to our next gathering. In the past, I’d had prominent authors jump at the chance, excited to spend a night trading ideas with like-minded colleagues. But this potential guest was more skeptical. “I might have a conflict that night,” he wrote. “But can you let me know who’s going to be there and I’ll see if I can get around to it?” In other words: Was there anyone important enough to be worth his time? I humored him with the list, and he agreed to attend—until the event was threatened by inclement weather. He wrote back eagerly: Is the event still on? Who’s still coming? Demanding a guest list is the equivalent of craning your neck at a cocktail party to see if someone more worthy of your attention has walked in the door. Of course, it’s important to guard your time and be selective about which events you attend, but there has to be a baseline of trust and humility, especially when you’ve been introduced by a mutual contact. Make your best decision about whether to attend—and stick to it.
Make a choice about what to be bad at
Last year, I’d reached a point where I was feeling overwhelmed about my contacts. I knew I should be keeping in touch with people, but the volume had gotten so great, I didn’t know where to start. I signed up for a service called Contactually that helps track your interactions and sends you reminders when you’ve been out of touch with key people too long. A few weeks ago, they offered a free analysis of my email performance over the past year, looking for patterns and weak spots. Desperate for illumination, I had them run one … and got a D+, by far the worst grade I’ve ever received for anything besides handwriting. It was sad, true, and quantified before my eyes: I’m very pokey at responding to most emails. But I do have a policy: Unless it’s a spammy message, I will respond eventually. It’s not perfect, but it’s a trade-off I feel comfortable making thanks to Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’s excellent book Uncommon Service, in which they argue that in order to become truly great at something (such as a bank being open long hours), companies have to make an equally important choice about something to be bad at (such as offering unusually low interest rates on deposits). The same advice works for individuals. I’ve chosen to be bad at email response time because it’s less important to me than serving clients or creating new content. But I’ll never let it get to the point where there’s no response. (My hero in this regard is Wharton professor Adam Grant, who hired an assistant just to help him respond to each and every message he got as the result of a popular New York Times Magazine profile. Though I make some use of virtual assistants, I’m now contemplating hiring someone full time.)
…
Managing your time is a constant balance—too loose, and you spin off in a million unproductive directions; too tight, and you eliminate serendipity and come off like a controlling prima donna. We all have to find the procedures that work for our lives and schedules, but it’s important to do it in a way that doesn’t needlessly alienate others.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org, February 6, 2015 (product #H01V9I).