Learning is not a spectator sport

I’m sure many of you have seen the memes and the like on social media where every time someone says “Can you join a Zoom call?” or “Can you pop onto Teams?” and we all groan and think to ourselves “This is going to be a nightmare of a day”

Most probably this is simply due to the fact that when you jump onto a Zoom call or something similar, people are just worried about the imposition on their time since often there is no guaranteed end time to the call. This tends to get exponentially worse the more people on the call.

But let me give you a genuine reason why you should always push back on someone requesting a quick zoom call with you, and no, it’s not simply be cause you might find it annoying.

In my experience the most common reason someone asks you to jump onto a video call is because they have yet to organize their thoughts into a coherent message to describe the problem. The best way to do that is to write the facts and ideas down, go through them and cleanse the content into a logical structure.

But that takes time and effort.

Thus it can often be the case that someone will request a video meeting because the task of building that coherent message is difficult, and therefore they use the video call in order to work through that process. The fundamental problem with this approach is that your time will indeed be wasted, because you should not have been involved until the construction of that coherent message was already completed. It also wastes the requestors time, because if you think gathering your thoughts together logically in isolation is hard, it is much much harder when there are a few sets of frustrated eyes on you at the other end of the webcam.

Hence is if someone is asking for a Zoom call, my recommendation to you is this: The first thing you should ask for is an email from them with the problem statement, discussion points and what potential solutions have been considered or need to be worked through. Simply having that content in an email may obviate the need for a Zoom call entirely, because you might be able to find fatal flaws or obvious solutions. But more importantly if the meeting does go ahead you now both have a common base from which to work from, and a common set of assumptions and methods by which you will try work toward a solution.

So don’t feel bad about saying “No” to “Can you pop onto a Zoom call?”. But be aware is this is a “No, not just yet” as opposed to “No, not ever” 🙂

Often saying no is actually going to be the fastest way to get both parties in the conversation to a resolution be cause it will force the requester to come up with a coherent set of thoughts which will then give you the best evidence and information to work toward a solution both minimising your time and theirs.