Saving Time

One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, just went down a few notches in my estimation. I looked at his website and found a plain blue page that basically said “Don’t email or try to contact me; I don’t have the time to read foolishness from regular people; all of my time and attention are spoken for--several times over. Please do not ask for them.” OK.

I understand an aversion to getting unwanted mail (goodness knows Capital One credit cards have been, for a long time, MY most frequent correspondent and I’d just as soon they weren’t.) But that notion of time – that a person hasn’t ANY to spare and whoever crosses his or her radar had better be quick or, preferably, not there at all – is pervasive in American business and, quite frankly, stupid.

These are generally the same people who sneak out of their offices to have a smoke 15 times a day. And the ones who can’t be bothered hearing out a whole argument so that they can make an informed decision about something. (When this is how valuable they imagine their time to be – I can certainly imagine the quality of their decision-making as a result. Actually, we SEE the quality of their decision-making every day and it is worrisome indeed. This is a topic of discussion at our dinner table frequently.)

I can guess how this whole trend got started. Years ago some peon told some other peon not to answer the business phone right away so that people would think they were busy when they were really sitting around the gas station playing cards. (This really happened – I have, well, 2nd hand knowledge of this. And the 1st peon did, in fact, end up managing the place!) This seemed like such a good strategy that it spread! Lots of phones went unanswered and then after a while that didn't seem overt enough so people started actually telling other people that they were too busy to answer their phones... Alright, maybe this isn’t actually how it got started, but you get the point. My suspicion is that the people who make the biggest fuss about how valuable their time is are the ones who mismanage their own enough that they have to pretend to be important because they aren’t doing anything anyway.

Saving time is important to us all. But since we don’t know where that next big idea is going to come from, or whether the next person we meet is going to turn out to be our new best friend, or the conversation we have with a stranger is going to result in the deal of a lifetime, or that the extra thought we put into solving a problem is going to mean the solution to twenty other ones, maybe we need to put a little more courtesy and consideration into how we save our time. The discussion you cut short may not yet have reached the point where someone asks the critical question that prevents you from looking up the launch codes.

I wasn’t interested in contacting Neal Stephenson in the first place. But I’m a lot less interested in his ideas now too.