Human beings love the illusion of work more than the work itself.
Which is why we “get on a call or get into meetings” to believe we are pushing the wheel forward. Whereas in reality, it is merely a rocking horse syndrome.
You may want to believe you are making progress, but you are just sitting on a stationary horse that is shaking on its place.
Deep thinking is rare. You need to put your thoughts together and condense it into an email, and that is hard work. But you know what? Putting your thoughts together will make you a deep thinker, and save you so much time that gets wasted in calls. And, let us not even begin to talk about the lost productivity after the call gets over.
That doesn’t mean we don’t get on calls. Please do. I sometimes get on short calls with my clients because it has been a long time we haven’t spoken 🙂 I really do. However, if we keep human interactions aside and go through the objective rationalisation of taking care of our time, most calls are “I don’t know what to think so let’s talk” calls. If we go through our call history of even last week and our Google calender, how many of those calls were actually needed?
What we do need is respite from our loneliness, and for that, we call people. It gives us temporary respite, and a dopamine high of “working so much”.
Maybe other human beings won’t help much, till the time you help yourself out much. Maybe then you’ll start enjoying whatever calls you choose to get on.
