You can’t deal with phone calls later and you sure can’t have control over them. Do a favor to yourself and switch to email or other preferred tools for collaboration that do a better job and save you both a ton of time and nerves.

By picking up the phone and making a request means (to the person making the request at least) something has to be done now, and it is most likely it can’t be done right now, so it is more likely to be forgotten about – even forgotten to be put on a to-do list.

However, if a request is being sent via email – it will sit in the inbox (or delegated somewhere else) until it’s the time to act on it. By sending an email – you are giving the person the benefit of dealing with it at their own time. This is really important with client work as you are most likely working with multiple projects/clients.

I have mentioned before that I use only two labels to take control of my email – ‘_process’ and ‘_hold’ (prefixed with an underscore so they’d show up first in label list). By applying the label _process to emails I am basically making them go away out of sight (the inbox) and it means that I’ll deal with them later (process them) when the time is right. The label _hold acts as a container for ongoing tasks, they are waiting for something to be done, so that they be replied to with the outcome.

That said – you see how _process is basically only a temporary folder for the emails to sit in and wait for me to look through them, while _hold is a temporary folder for emails that need to be acted upon and require a secondary action in order to be replied to (while _process labeled emails might not need a reply or any kind of action at all).

You can’t deal with phone calls later and you sure can’t have control over them. People think that by using words like ‘ASAP’, ‘now’ and ‘urgent’ in their conversations will make you do it sooner. It’s most likely that it won’t effect your schedule at all, you’ll still do it when you find time for it. Other than making a big sound over usually trivial things phone call requests are usually just an annoyance, they are an interruption and a time waster for both parties.

Do a favor to yourself and your collaborators and switch to email or other preferred tools for collaboration that do a better job and save you both a ton of time and nerves.