Monthly Archives: September 2013

Why I wear headphones at work

Misc

cat headphonesInterruptions are bad.

Interruptions are also common.

If you don’t want to be interrupted, too bad. It’s going to happen. There’s no way people can avoid interrupting you for the whole day.

But what you can do is indicate when you’re deep in work. When you’re doing the sort of work that requires intense concentration and will take 15 minutes to get back to.

For me this is headphones. I put on music and focus, and my coworkers know not to bug me unless it’s important.

Find your headphones. Whether it’s actual headphones (you can always put them on without any music playing if that’s what you prefer) or just some sort of indicator. Be cute about it! Put up a “recording in progress” sign or a mailbox flag.

Let people know you’re focused. Otherwise you can’t really complain when they interrupt you.

Cat photo courtesy of James Lee.

Thinking about keeping customers waiting longer than 5 minutes on hold?

Customer Service

“A recent Google consumer survey showed 57.8 percent of callers were willing to be put on hold for up to 5 minutes. But 32.3 percent of respondents said they were not willing to wait at all for a customer service representative. So if a business keeps callers waiting longer than 5 minutes, it will lose 90 percent of those calls, according to the survey.”

(emphasis added)

Via CustomerThink