The curse of the ping - what to do about all of those out of hours messages

Chris Barrow
Jun 3
2 min read

During our weekly client webinar last night, there was a vigorous conversation about observations made by Laura Horton, during her current Extreme Business workshop tour, on the need to stop tolerating Owners, Managers and team members who send WhatsApp and other instant messages out of hours.

That includes ealy and late during the week, and also weekends.

It reactivates the debate about "synchronous" versus "asynchronous" communication, the former demands instant response, the latter in your own time.

How it should be.......

Synchronous (right now)

Face to face (real people talking!)
Telephone
Zoom or equivalent
FaceTime or equivalent

Asynchronous (when it suits me)

Email
Letter
WhatsApp/text/Facebook or Insta message or equivalent

How it actually is (for those who allow it)

Synchronous (now, now now!)

Everything - because I carry my smartphone around with me and every time there is notification of an incoming message of any kind, I stop what I'm doing, because I feel as it I have to know what's going on - I'm frightened of missing out (FOMO) and every single piece of information, no matter how banal, has my immediate attention
I'm responding to my pings like a Pavlovian dog trained to salivate at the ringing of a bell - ping, ping, ping - in bed, in the bath, in the garden, in the cinema, in the restaurant, walking the dog, watching TV, in the loo - it never ends.

Laura's point - that has to stop.

It takes two of course - the sender and the receiver - they both have to stop.

However, ask my clients, "what about a genuine emergency?"

Last night, during our call, Rachel Barrow ran off a super-fast policy document (using our trained ChatGPT) and shared it with the group.

It's attached below - please download it for free, take a look, let me have your feedback at coachbarrow@me.com

Don't expect an immediate reply 😉 but I'm interested to know how you handle this.