Dealing with phone calls and email solicitation
As a freelancer, depending on your activity, you might get solicited by a number of different people. It can be recruiters, in-house people, marketing people for trying to sell you services, or just email and notifications.
How to deal with disturbance
All of those can be killing your process and productivity. If they are quick to do and fix, do them straight away. If not, just park them until later in the day.
It can be a bit overwhelming and it’s easy to get a bit on your nerve when people disturb you often. Don’t let it affect you, at the end of the day no one will die.
One of the person I was so impress working with is Anna. She is the lead designer in a branding agency. On a daily basis, she has client meeting, but also she is still doing lots of design herself. Plus she helps and keeps an eye on nearly all the project of the agency.
I was sitting next to her for about 3 months and I could see she got disturbed all day by requests (from project managers, etc).
Anna always stop what she is doing and respond very nicely with a calm voice, always in a friendly way, provide the help needed all the time before continuing what she is doing.
Most people would get grumpy (I do haha). Her attitude makes her a SUPER PERSON. And if it takes too long and she is really too busy, she will say it nicely and put off the request or delegate it to the relevant person.
If you are or act grumpy, your grumpiness will affect the people you interact with. And those will propagate the feeling to others. If you act nice same thing! So do your best to be good.
Apply this to all including phone calls (even if it’s from rubbish recruiters haha). Most of the time, you don’t know who is calling. If you answer the phone be polite and friendly as this could be your next big opportunity.
How to get better at it?
With time, you will train you brain to switch between task without losing track of what you are doing. In order to do that you need to be in top health, sleep well, eat well, take breaks.
