Focused - 26: A Batphone to My Heart

Episode Date: July 25, 2017

Telephones and text messaging seem like necessary evils at best, but for many small businesses they're required. You just need to figure out how to use them effectively--and set rules so that they aren't abused. While Jason leaves the phone off the hook, David describes his trial of Google Voice and ultimate decision to use a live receptionist service.

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they'd had enough. Now, they are independent workers learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. We're brought to you this week by Timing and FreshBooks. I'm Jason Snell, and I'm joined, as always, by my fellow host, David Sparks. Hi, David. Hi, Jason.

It's good to be back. It is. All right. I have, there's a phone call for you, sir. I hate phone calls. I do, too. I do, too. Why are we talking about them? But I think maybe that where why are we talking about them but i think maybe

that is why we're talking about them this episode is all about communications yes well sort of uh we decided because there's a lot under that umbrella of communication so this episode we're going to talk about telephones and text messaging i thought those were two that would fit in an episode all right so you're gonna leave email for another day i think that's good i think that's good and also kind of the slack you know party line kind of stuff going on too we'll say that for another day i think that's i think that's good i uh i that's where i spend an awful lot of my time these days and i i can make arguments for and against it but we'll save that for another another couple of episodes because i think there's a lot of room there i i revisiting email is also something that it's going to take some time, but I think is a really

interesting topic because email is still necessary, even though it's a lot less than it was. And there's all sorts of philosophies there. So, we'll leave those for other times, a little teaser and focus more on telephones and text messaging and things like that in our lives and in this modern era. As I made my move to become an independent free agent, I spent a lot of time thinking about how are telephones going to fit into this new enterprise? That was actually a hard question for me. Do you do a lot of telephone work? Was the telephone a big part of your job as a lawyer at a law firm? Yep. Yep.

And it still is. I mean, I just, before we got on the line today, I spent a half hour trying to tell somebody that they shouldn't do something. And that was on the phone? Yeah. I mean, it happens all the time. They need to hear it sometimes. And so, you know, as a lawyer, I work on contracts with other lawyers, you know, for the other

companies and spend time talking about that. I spend time consulting with clients. And a lot of this stuff is not conducive to email or texting or any other types of communication. You need that immediate feedback. I could sit here and email you back and forth 20 times about a contract with all the issues, or we could get on the phone 45 minutes and just bang it out makes sense so i had to i had to think about telephones what about you when you were leaving did you give any thought to what am i going to do about a telephone no that's the short version is is i never for me in my career the telephone it's been a very long time since the telephone was anything but a place where garbage happened, where garbage was collected.

Every so often, it would be like a manager calling and we would do a check-in. I had remote managers the last couple of years at IDG, and so I would know when they were calling and I'd see their call or ID and I'd pick up. But generally, I didn't answer my phone. I sent it all to voicemail. answer my phone. I send it all to voicemail. And my voicemail at the office basically said, you don't really want to leave a voicemail, send me an email. Just like that. Like, you can do it. And I did occasionally check, but I was down by the end, I was not checking my voicemail even more than once a week. Because it's just like the message said, don't do it. Just don't do it. Yeah. I had a friend that worked for a famous fruit company and he told me that he had a message

on his machine that said, you can leave a message, but I have never listened to any messages. So, you should probably find another way to contact me. Yeah. That's about where I ended up. And, you you know it used to be back in the day when i started in the 90s like yeah you get a call from pr person or you know there was always things to do about that but by the end it was just like all of my collaboration was how having an working in other places so uh the telephone ended up being kind of a garbage dump and i was using my cell phone and i would not give that message out to people like my cell phone was like people who knew like my co-workers knew my cell phone and so they could call it and then I would talk to them that didn't happen a lot but they they knew that and then there was my office phone which was just not I mean that was just where the junk ended up so

what I'm saying is that I think you are the person who's going to be doing the heavy lifting here in terms of talking about the phone because you actually do use still use a phone as part of your as part of your uh your everyday job which makes sense and i you know the i talk to people on podcasts but not on the telephone that's basically my life now yeah that's when you and i talk yeah yeah it's true before for those who don't know we like uh before we get started we we have we talk about all sorts of stuff and afterward we've solved how to fix comic-con and how conventions are run but you don't get that because this is not that podcast this is about free agents but that's again it's a nice thing to do uh between us but we do it sort of in the guise of a podcast but But so, it's good to hear about you. It makes sense that

you, in your role, in your identity, secret identity as a lawyer would spend a lot of time with clients on the phone because that is, in some ways, would you say the most clear, direct way of communicating with someone? Get the email out of it, get the, you know, comments in a shared document out of it and just say, look, we're two human beings talking here. Tell me what you want. Let me express myself. Would you say that that's like the most direct, purest way to communicate? I'd like to say that.

But, you know, some lawyers are, you know, are a little knucklehead, you know. So, some people you get off the phone with they send you an email saying oh this just confirms that you just told me that the sky is purple and the grass is green you know so so it depends on the person but i i would say it's the best way to cut to the chase and just kind of say let's work this out all right i look at the phone as something that can punch an hour uh hole in my day at any moment um because being a lawyer is kind of, even a business lawyer like me, is kind of a fireman. Sometimes suddenly a client has a big problem and they

call and you take the call and you thought you had a clear afternoon and you don't anymore. It's also an excellent source of business. People find me and call me and some of my clients don't live close to me. I have clients all over

the state so it's my office in a lot of ways so i talk to my san francisco clients and they can't walk in your door like i'm gonna go over to david's and ask him a question because it's not that kind of world that you live in generally so instead they give you a ring yeah and i guess we could talk about just healthy attitudes towards them i think we will at some point but first let's just kind of talk about you're getting ready to go out on your own. How are you going to deal with the phones? Assume that you're in some kind of business like mine where you need to have a phone. Jason had it nice. You didn't really have to worry about it.

It's kind of weird in our tech community. It's kind of sacred calling somebody on the phone. Like if Jason called me on the phone, I would worry that like something was on fire or something. You know, if he called me. Especially if it was unscheduled right we will occasionally have scheduled phone calls when we were planning this podcast we had some scheduled phone calls we that definitely happens but to just uh if it came out of the blue you'd be like oh geez what's going on and um you know and we had you and i've had a couple of those too in the last year where it's been like something's going on that needs your attention that's happening. So, it happens, but you're right.

It is, you know what it is about the telephone? And this is just in general about the telephone in a world where we have all these different kinds of electronic communications. A telephone is synchronous. And that, or a video chat is the same way, a FaceTime, any of those things. It's synchronous. Or a video chat is the same way of FaceTime, any of those things. It's synchronous. You are saying, I need to talk to you right now, and you need to give me your full attention, and I will give you my full attention right at this very moment. No deferring, right? No answer at your leisure. We need to be like zero latency face to face or voice to voice right now and that's its power but also if you're in a business like our business here um where we have

all these other ways to do asynchronous communication it becomes kind of a last resort because it's because it does require both people to be available and like you said if that can punch out an hour in your day if if you are like well right now we're going to talk for an hour that's it you've got to do it you can't say i'll get back to you and maybe you can say call me in two hours but that's about all you can do yeah the implication that comes with that is that whatever you are doing right now is less important than what i need to talk to you about yeah or there's an under at the very least there's an understanding like i think right because there's that whatever you are doing right now is less important than what I need to talk to you about. Yeah. Or there's an, at the very least there's an understanding like I, right. Because there's abuse and then there's good use of it. I think when I make these calls, sometimes what it really

is, is like, um, you, you, when you hear what we're talking about, you're going to, you're going to agree that we need to talk about it now. I think sometimes like, like, like you said, if I call you and you're like, oh, Jason is calling me. I think the implication there is the reason I'm calling you is it's important enough that I need to talk to you right now. But it can also be horribly abused where, you know, it's like important to them or worse, not even important to them. And they're going to make it important to you by forcing themselves into your life by ringing that phone. Yeah. And so, so one of the ways I solve this is I am pretty, pretty careful about not scheduling calls in the mornings.

I really try to, when I'm setting up something with a client, I'll say, you know, I try to go for afternoon calls and I figure that's, I'm not, my bandwidth isn't as high in the afternoon. In the morning I want to be, have my head down on work projects. And in the afternoon, I can get on the phone and be more chatty. And so there's some steps you can take for that. Like when someone wants to talk to you on the phone, you send them a suggested time. Say, how about next Tuesday at 2 p.m.?

And that kind of locks it down. There's some good best practices for this. I also feel like if someone does call you when you're busy, you don't have to take that call. I don't know what it is about my generation. When we grew up, the phone was such a unique snowflake. When the phone rang, it was before all the telemarketing stuff really took off. You know, the phone rang, it was like usually the harbinger of news from family or a friend that wanted to go play Donkey Kong or something. So you had to grab it. And I've been able to train myself out of that. So where I just don't take a lot of calls,

even if it's somebody I know, if I'm busy, I just, I know I'll get back to them later. Yeah, I think that setting, this goes back to things we've talked about several times in this show, but it's setting limits, like setting, set limits, set rules going in and that you can save yourself a lot of grief

by setting limits. Yeah, but the real place I'd like to talk about some of this stuff is if you're setting up your independent business, how do you address the phone just in terms of underlying technology? I mean, if you're leaving a big job from a big company, they probably had a phone number on the front door that wasn't your cell phone number. And you should give some thought to that because do you want, assuming that you're starting a business that does involve telephone calls,

do you want your cell phone number to become the contact number for your business? In service-focused businesses, sometimes that makes sense. I have clients that have my cell phone number. They're kind of people that get on the inside, people that I trust and know aren't going to abuse it. But I also wanted to have a phone number that people could call that wasn't my cell phone number.

So as I started to start my own business, I looked into the options available for that. If you look at my business card, it doesn't have my cell phone number on it. It's got a fancy business number. And if you call it, somebody answers it and says, law and they're sound very efficient right and um so how do you do that as a new person getting started so tell tell me because i was going to talk about some some real do-it-yourself options uh like the one i experienced experimented with and i i don't currently have this because i don't have a phone number on my business card at all i believe um i i think the the and if i do it is my cell phone number which is maybe a problem but i go i i'm very limited in who i give those out to

and i don't think there's a phone number on it at all because don't call me really seriously don't um is i use google google voice for a, which is not a person who's going to answer and say, hello, The Incomparable Incorporated, how may I direct your call? It is a, you know, it's a service from Google that has a phone number attached to it. And the way I used that was I actually set up, I set it up to forward to my cell phone during business hours on weekdays, right? Business hours. Yeah. And the rest of the time, it went straight to voicemail.

And the idea there was, it was my business line. And if you called it during the day, my business line rang on my phone. And if you called any other time, it just left a voicemail. And it has some nice features in that it's got kind of a auto transcription of the voicemails, and you can play them back on a web browser or in an app. And there are lots of nice things about it. But what it let me do is have a second phone number that could do what I want. And if I went on vacation, or I just decided that this was too many phone calls, I could also change the rules. So it wouldn't forward to my cell phone or only certain numbers would forward to my cell phone, which was kind of interesting. So I used

that for a while. And I would say that was effective. Although in the end, I didn't want any of these calls to come to my cell phone because I had clearly decided that calls to my cell phone were of a higher priority. And, um, and, and I wasn't getting enough of those high priority calls to even make it worth it. Yeah. So, so that's the first decision you really have to make is do I need an external line at all? I think ultimately you didn't need one, right? No, I agree. That's, I still have that Google voice line, by the way, it's still kind of kicking around, but I just don't use it. I don't give it out because I don't really want to encourage anyone to call me that way. And if I am, if I'm close enough to you or, or you need to talk to me, I'll give you my number, right? I'll give you my

cell phone number and I don't have a problem with that, but I don't have it. Almost the way you could think about it is categorization. I don't have anybody that I think of as in the category of, I want them to be able to reach me by phone, but not my regular phone. Like that category doesn't exist for me. I don't have an open door for people to call me. The people who need to know can get my phone number from me, but nobody else gets it. And I'm fortunate to be in that situation. And you're not in that situation. You do need to have something that you post that you give out. That is, if you need to contact David Sparks, here's a, here's a phone number. And I'm just fortunate to not be in that boat. Yeah. It really, that's a really good way of cutting it up. Just say, look, if I've got

the type of business where I don't need someone to have a phone number that's not necessarily in my circle of trust. Right. It's the advertised phone number. It's the public phone number. Yeah. And for me, that is the case. I need that separate number. Like I don't do a lot of litigation, but I do some. And just I had a court clerk call me the other day. And of course, they called in on my published number through my exchange, my people. And I don't want to give a court clerk my cell phone number, you know, or opposing counsel for that matter. And so, it just, there's certain

categories of people in my life that I just don't want to have my cell phone number, but they still need a phone number for me. It's just like fax machines. I have a fax line too, Jason. That's a whole other story. Oh, well, is that a lawyer thing? It's because I have some old clients, you know. Oh, interesting. Is it a real fax somewhere or is it one of these digital fax numbers that's a virtual number? Yeah, okay. And so you get like an email with a PDF? Yep.

Nice. Nice. But getting back to the telephone, I knew I needed a phone number. I needed an outside phone number. And I didn't want to spend a lot of money because I was just getting started and I didn't even know if the whole thing was going to work or not. So I did the Jason Snell route. I got myself a Google Voice number. And Google Voices are super powerful.

You know, Google is really good at saying, you know, if this person is in my contact list, you can be very granular about what it does with those. It's not only the time of day, it's who it's coming from. And they also do a transcription service where if someone leaves a message, they transcribe it, which is usually kind of hilarious there. It's not their best work in my experience. Apple does something similar with my voicemails. And what I found in both cases is it's good enough to give you a real broad sense about what the voicemail is about. But if you, if you're looking at the details, it's hilariously terrible. So, yeah. But so I did the Google voice thing, but I also knew because court clerks and other lawyers and even potential clients will be calling this phone number. I did not want it to go to a robot.

It always made me kind of frustrated when I'd call a law firm and there wasn't a person to talk to, because sometimes, you know, there's all kinds of weird things that happen in the law, but you need to give special notice to people and do things. And having a body on the other side makes it a lot easier. I didn't want to hire a full-time receptionist. It didn't make sense for what I was doing. So I started looking at my options. At the place where I get my space, that's another show we talked about how I have this temporary, basically a portable office, whatever you want to call it. They will answer the phones for you there. And they charge $100 a month. So you can forward your Google Voice or whatever number to that number, and they'll pick it up, and they'll say the name of your business and take messages for you.

And so when I was signing up to sign into this place as my address, I was listening to the people answer the phones, and they were doing it terribly. You could tell it was just a huge interruption to them. And they couldn't wait to get off the phone with every call that came in because that's not really what they're there for. They're there to manage the office and do other things. So I knew my starting point was a hundred bucks a month and that, that I wasn't going to be happy with the solution available to me. So I started looking at other options and that led me on a little spirit quest of all these various services. There's a bunch of Internet startups with this type of stuff, and the company I ended up going with was one out of Portland called Ruby Receptionist,

and I've been a customer of theirs now for over two years. You're coming up on three years, aren't you, Jason? I am coming up on three years. That's true. It's scary. So I pay these people in Portland $250 a month, which is one of the biggest expenses of my little business. It's a lot of money. But as I look at it, it's $150 more than lousy phone service based on what I saw. And this is like SEAL Team 6 of phone answering services. I mean, they are amazing.

I mean, that's all they do is answer phones they're super pleasant they really try to um they try to portray whoever they're representing in a good and positive light uh they'll do more than just answer phones if i want they'll call people back they have an app so i can just say i'm in a meeting uh for the next two hours in the app and then it automatically updates in their system. Oh, so they can actually say, oh, he's in a meeting for the next two hours. You want me to take a message? You want to call back? Exactly.

Wow. Yeah. Not only do they do it through the app, they can do it through email. So I have some text expander snippets where I can very quickly get a message off to them that I'm unavailable. expander snippets where I can very quickly get a message off to them that I'm unavailable. Just a lot of one of the things they've done over time that I've been working with them. One of the problems I had was Google Voice became terrible for me. I don't know what happened, but they dedicated less, you know, bandwidth to Google Voice about a year and a half ago. And so people that were going to Google, calling me through Google voice, then getting

relayed to, um, uh, to Portland for this company. And then down to me, it sounded like an old episode of mash, you know, when radar would talk to Sparky and it's like you had to crank the wheel and then wait for the response. And it was really frustrating because, you know, people are paying me money to solve their problems and they don't want to have a bad phone connection. People are paying me money to solve their problems, and they don't want to have a bad phone connection. So I ultimately went with Ruby Receptionist will manage the phone line for me. So they switched it over to whatever system they're using. And it's portable.

If I ever leave them, they let me take the phone number with me. So they're handling that for me. And now they've got a thing in the app where I can make a phone call from the Ruby Receptionist app, and it'll spoof my actual, you know, my outside line number. So I can call from my cell phone, but it looks like I'm calling from my office number. Oh, right. So the people you're calling never see your cell phone number. Yeah. If you don't want them to. Yeah.

Well, I was calling a guy the other day who owes my client a bunch of money. I didn't want to give him my cell phone number. Right. Right. So I did it through the app. So it's an expensive service for phone service, but I've been very happy with it. And they're just a great company, good people. They just sponsor the AppCamp for Girls thing.

So I like the people that are there. And it's not cheap, like I said, but i have a very professional sounding you know reception service yeah i it sounds to me like this is what you do if you need to this goes back to our conversations about your virtual office that you have to these are these are all you are in a business and i think a lot of people are in businesses like this where you want that veneer of professionalism you want people to uh feel like when they call you, they're not getting some sort of, you know, rinky-dink outfit or a guy who's working in his bedroom, even if that is who you are. You want to say, like, at this level, people are not going to understand that. And so I'm going to – now there are services.

You don't have to hire a receptionist and release office space. You can get that by paying this. And it's a lot cheaper to pay a service like this for, you know, this monthly rate than it would be to hire a full-time receptionist because, you know, so that's the beauty of it. But for somebody like me, it wouldn't make any sense. But, you know, for an attorney or somebody in real estate or, you know, there are probably lots of other businesses where you want to have that receptionist in front of your phone line. Yeah.

You know, when you think about it, it's three grand a year, which that buys, you know, several tickets to Hawaii, but I don't try to think about it too much. And it's a lot cheaper than paying somebody to sit in an office and answer phones all day. Yeah, exactly right. That being said, as my practice has evolved over the years, I don't use it nearly as much as I did at the beginning because I'm doing less litigation. But I still feel like it's kind of like the trappings of a law practice that needs to exist at least for the next several years. So I don't see myself going anywhere. But now that I have that, so how do I

use the phone in the practice? Uh, I'm very careful. Like I said, I try, I try to schedule time when I'm unavailable. Like when I was talking about earlier, I don't like to take calls in the morning. If I'm really buckling down in the morning, I will probably, um, just submit a thing to Ruby saying I'm in a meeting for the morning. And then the calls just don't come through at all. I never see them. And then I get emails and messages later that summarize all the calls that came in. Another thing that Ruby does is cool is somebody leaves a voicemail message. They email it to me so I can listen to it and I have a record of it.

But the flip side of that is a lot of people, once they say they get inside the circle of trust, they're people who have become my clients that I trust and I know that I can trust them with my cell phone, they can still get through to me. And I always tell people, I have a little spiel I give when I give you my cell phone number. I'm like, here's my cell phone number. If I can answer it, I will. If I can't, I won't. And they understand that, you know, just kind of shorthand. That's like no guilt.

And they understand that, you know, just kind of shorthand. That's like no guilt. Well, I love that because that is you saying, don't feel guilty about calling me. Call me if you need to call me. If I can't answer, I won't. So don't worry about it. Like, just give it a shot. Yeah, I had a call the other day. Like, it was 11 p.m.

A client that has never called me on my cell, except maybe once in the last two years, called me at 11 p.m a client that has never called me on myself except maybe once in the last two years called me at 11 p.m so i picked up and he's like my son just got arrested for tui what do i do i'm like okay call this criminal attorney and and i'm gonna go back to sleep now yeah yeah but you have the ability to do that and that's that's good you're also there's a there's a social compact there right which is i'm giving you this number so so call if you need to, but understand that you're calling because you need to, and you made that judgment of, okay, this isn't my person who calls me three times a week about things that are nothing. This is somebody who never calls me, so I should pick up. And so I think that's an important conversation to have, whether you go the Ruby reception line or some other way. As soon as you start giving numbers out, you know, tell people what your expectation of the phone is.

It's not necessarily a bat phone to my heart at any moment. Right. Good point. All right. So what are your options? You know, you get the I think the um there's several uh internet provided voice services you don't have to go the old school route and call 1810 get a line installed anymore i think the internet stuff is is just fine um make sure you spend some time testing as i found out with google voice um there was delay in the line and it was really a pain in the neck so whatever service you're going to try,

spend a little time checking it out before you commit. I would also say that a lot of these over internet telephony services have just dreadful contracts where they want you to agree to like two years and it automatically renews unless, you know, you ride in on a unicorn, you know, seven hours before termination or whatever. It's just a crazy, crazy contract. So make sure you pay attention before you click buttons on the internet when you sign up for one of these telephone services. Did you look at Skype?

Because that's something that Skype also offers, and they've got, obviously, desktop and mobile apps. And you can pay Skype, and they give you a phone number, and it rings your Skype account. I was aware of it, but because I wanted to connect to something like Ruby, I felt like I needed the more traditional Internet-based line stuff. So if I didn't need Ruby, I probably would be more inclined to look at something like that. How about yourself?

You just don't need it. I just don't want it yeah i i'm not i i have i don't have any scenario where that i can think of where i would need to give somebody my phone number who is somebody i want to be that insulated from because like even if it's somebody who is meeting me for coffee someday um i might give that person my phone number but i probably just text them with like i message or something where it doesn't even give away my phone number and certainly even if i give them my phone number to text me it's not that big a deal if that person if we have one meeting and then never see each other again and then they start calling me i'll just block them and move on with my life and not worry about it so it's not it's not it's not out there for the public to consume so it's not a big deal if i that that for me was the threshold it's like if i need to start just like posting

on my website somewhere call this number it can't be my cell phone number and i would need another number and i probably revive revive my google voice number at that point for that reason and create a place where those calls could go that was not my phone, but I don't really have to deal with it. So going out on your own, I think that the decision points are number one, is the telephone even relevant to you? Yep. And if you're lucky, it's not. And if it is relevant to you, do you have that group of people that need your phone number that needs to get access to you via phone, but is not worthy of your cell phone number? So I guess if you get to that point,

you need to look at some of these options for getting an outside number. Google Voice isn't a bad place to start. Look at some of the other options. And then if you really want to go for the whole enchilada and you want someone to answer the phone for you i would strong i would recommend ruby receptions there it's a good company i've been very happy with them but you know i'm sure people listening may have others that they like yeah that sounds like overkill for for smaller people but if it depends on your job depends on what kind of category you're in i think that you might that might be more than worth it to do that yeah all right we're gonna move on and talk about text messaging but before we do that let's take a break and talk about our sponsor one of our two sponsors this

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You forget and then you're backtracking and it's a mess. Timing the app is very different. It automatically tracks how you spend your time. It logs which apps you use, which websites you visit, not just that you were in Safari, but like what website URLs were open, what documents with their titles were you editing. So you can very easily categorize all of your activities into projects. It's easy. It's fuss free. Your data isn't uploaded to anyone's server. It stays on your computer at all times. I have been trying this out. I've been training it. I've been setting up projects with rules so I can say these apps work in these kinds of things. This means I was working on podcasting. This means I was working on writing. And then this other stuff, I might not

have been working on anything. But the web browser stuff is what blows me away because that lets me also say if I'm in the CMS of all of these, that's the posting tool I use for my own website or for other websites that I write for, it knows and timing files those properly. If I'm using an app for podcast editing or I'm visiting a podcast website to post an article or to post a podcast episode, those get filed properly. It's pretty amazing. And then, of course, there's a timeline so I can go back through the day and say, oh, what was I doing then? And I can even manually put in, this is what I was doing and allocated, it sends a pop up notification at the next day that says, here's how productive you were, you can actually rate your productivity waiting for each project that you're involved with lots of different great ways to get a sense of where that time went. And I have definitely had that blink at the end of the day and wonder where the time went. So this has been a great view into how I spend and or waste my time. Now timing is so confident that you will love this fuss free approach to time tracking. They offer a free trial,

just go to timing app.com to try it out today and once you decide to buy use the code free agents one word to save 20 off until the end of july once you start using timing to catch those unproductive hours it will end up paying for itself stop guessing how you spend your time and focus on doing what you're good at go to timingapp.com and get your copy of timing today thank you timing for supporting free agents and RelayFM. All right, David. One of the things I like about Timing is I'm finding out all my time sinks in it, looking at them, figuring out where I'm spending time that I forgot about.

It gives you that moment where you're mousing over the timeline, and you're like, oh, and then I went in the YouTube sinkhole right here and didn't do anything for half an hour, right? And that's sobering. But sometimes I feel good about it too, where I look there and I'm like, that's right, I was working on all that stuff. And I love that it knows that in the end,

that's the goal. And I still got more work to do, I think, to get everything kind of completely tuned to the way I work. But I really like the fact that if I can set up some rules and I can drag and drop different things into different categories, and then all of a sudden I look and I say, look, I actually was that productive.

Like that for me, that's always been the challenge is how do you automate it so that you can say, this is what I define as productive and then just watch me and timing. I'm getting close to being able to do all of that with timing, which is great. So we talked about telephones. I think another related technology that you need to consider as a free agent is text messaging. Telephones give you instant access to your voice. Text messaging gives you instant access to somebody's attention as well. I've always felt like there was this kind of expectation with a text message that it got a response faster than an email.

Yeah, that's the real question, right? Is what is your expectation with a text message? Because it's asynchronous. Like I said earlier about phones being synchronous, the text doesn't necessarily need to be read at the moment that it was sent or replied to immediately. So that's the question. What is your expectation about what a text message does and what it means and what its priority is? That makes all the difference. How do text messages work in your business? Do you use them? Yes. Yes, I would say so. And even if we take things like Slack out of the equation,

although I do a lot of things that I used to do in text in Slack, only because when you're in a Slack group with somebody, you can send them a direct message. I do this occasionally on Twitter too. It's the same thing. But I would almost classify those all as about the same thing, because in the end, it's a one-to-one sending a brief text line to somebody but i do absolutely use text messages and i don't know i feel like the i i view it as the possibility exists of having a back-to-back conversation but i appreciate that if they can't respond they won't and they'll get to it later and i also appreciate that you can have a conversation that's stretched out that they're doing other things so sometimes i'll have these conversations that arrange over several hours

with somebody in text messages but the gap between messages is kind of long where we're having a conversation it's more rapid than maybe other like email or something like that but it's not the gap between messages is kind of long where we're having a conversation. It's more rapid than maybe other like email or something like that, but it's not like a flurry of messages and then done. Sometimes it can be stretched out a little bit. So that's how I view it is. It's a little more immediate than email potentially, but I'm not expecting an immediate response. If they're not able to read it,

then they're not able to read it. And nor do I expect to respond immediately if I'm doing something else. I can let it wait. What about you? I think this is one of those things where expectations are important. Again, I know that in my mind, for some reason, like a Slack message to me is more like an email where I think someone sends it to me. They don't expect me to respond immediately. where I think someone sends it to me, they don't expect me to respond immediately. But for some reason, the text message is more immediate, you know, and I don't really have a good reason for that, except that's kind of the way I started text messaging. But the problem is, it doesn't matter what I think, a lot of times it matters what my clients

think. And when they text message me more often than not, they are expecting a response faster than an email. And I don't want to necessarily give them those pipes, you know, give them the ability to distract me at any point and require me to go deal with it. I just got like one today, someone texted me and said, I just sent you an email, I need you to read it right now. And you know what, I didn't read it. I'm in the middle of some other stuff that's important as well. And the fact that you send me a text message isn't going to allow me to, you know, to jump the line for stuff. If I don't have time, if I had time, I would have, I would have given it more priority, but I just, at the, at the moment I

was in the middle of something else that was super important. Right. So, um, so that's an issue and there, there's a disconnect there. So I think, uh, as you get in, I try to avoid text messaging with, with people in the legal side of my life. It's kind of funny, you know, on the Mac Sparky side, I text all the time and Slack and all that. But with the legal side, I kind of try to just discourage it for a variety of reasons. One of them is it's just like, it's an imprecise method of communication, in my opinion. It's just very clear text, very short, and a lot of time the instruction is not clear, and I have to make decisions and do things based on what you tell me. This is a case where quite often I would rather get on the phone and get a full explanation from

you than do something that you may not want me to do because I misunderstood a text message. So I discourage it with people. And I don't, I think I've been able to keep it out of my law practice to a large degree, but I still have some clients because once you give them your cell phone number, they have the ability to text you. Yeah, that's true. And, and, oh boy. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's why when you give somebody your cell phone number, you really need to have some degree of confidence because it does open that door, doesn't it? we're going to do together on the phone, I have a very specific system. You know, we did a show on task management and I, you know, I create the nominee focus task or Apple notes or whatever I'm doing. You could do that based on a text message, but because the messages themselves are so nebulous, sometimes things come out of them that I'm not even sure came out of them.

So it's hard for me to process those into actionable items. And it just is kind of mushy area of my life where I try to manage things, but it's harder for me to manage what comes out of a text message. So I guess I would say as a lawyer, I'm not a big fan of text messages. As a geek author, they're fine. But it does give to me that same sense of immediacy that is kind of like the panicked phone call from someone that i don't get phone calls from that often so um yeah i i it's funny i i hear what you're saying about how actionable they are and i think it's very smart for you to not try to have your legal life in text message form sometimes i have the text messages i've got sometimes they're very business-like um it's literally like

uh like one of my editors that I write freelance columns for she and I go back and forth about what my column topic should be and that tends to happen in a text which is kind of weird but it's very much like I'll ping her or she'll ping me and be like oh is it time to write that article and I'll say any ideas and we'll throw some stuff around I'll say okay I'll go I'll go her or she'll ping me and be like, oh, is it time to write that article? And I'll say any ideas and we'll throw some stuff around and I'll say, okay, I'll go, I'll go write something and get it back to you. But it's almost like, uh, it, it, it works for that moment and then it's done. And there's an actionable item that comes out of the conversation, but the conversation is, we, you know, maybe a little bit more of a creativity and also kind of an agreement about the scope of the work. And then we move on. And that works fine, because that is a back and forth

that would not be as good an email, if you're trying to throw ideas around where you want kind of a little more sudden back and forth, and then you want to be able to walk away. So that that is a way that I use text messages for that kind of the work part. Also, similar, although whether I do it there or in Slack, is I'll send a link to somebody of a story I'm working on and saying, could you look at this and check, let me know if this, does this look okay? Does this look really stupid, what I'm saying here? And that's the same thing where I'm just kind of passing it over and saying, look at this when you get a chance.

I could do that in email, but honestly, I feel like email is, most of these people that I'm working with, email is not a place that they consider remotely important. And so, I want to get them something where they know it's direct and it's a little more important than read at your leisure, which I feel like email is at this point. But I feel like with both of your examples, and they're good examples of effective use of text messaging, but the thing that the assumption is, in both of those examples, you have a pre-existing relationship. You know you're going to be writing an article. Yes. You know the approximate length. You know what you're going to be getting paid. Most of the transaction is resolved. Right. And you have this small piece of it that you just need to sort out to the details yeah and and a text message is a great for that because you know exactly when

you're when you're trading topic ideas you know exactly what the context of that is and where you get in trouble is where you don't have as many of the details resolved and you start trying to do this in a text message and it just gets ugly and And then, I mean, I've even seen in the law practice, I've seen lawsuits that come out of these text messages where people think they bought a house and they didn't or something like that, you know, because they're just so imprecise. So there's a place for it. And this is another one that kind of depends on your industry and what your customers are and what the relationship is. your industry and what your customers are and what the relationship is. But I think, I think one thing you can do is have some best practices as you get into this is how far are you going to go down the text message rabbit hole and how are you going to communicate to your customers and contacts how that works? Well, how do you do that? This is, it's like breaking up

with somebody. Thanks for texting me, but don't. Yeah. Well, so I have, I have a couple of ways to deal with that. So so because that's something i run into um i am when someone starts text messaging me details on the law side is i will send them an email and just say hey i got your messages uh just so you know for stuff like this i prefer that we we handle an email so it's more precise you know and even i will suggest a phone call you know getting back to the thing that you hate. Yeah, but that's like, we should all do that more. I feel like I think that I think you're making a good point here, where if I if I were to abstract it, what I would say is respond in the appropriate communication channel. Like, if somebody sends you a text,

and it really ought to be an email, put it in email. If somebody sends you a text and it really ought to be an email put it in email if somebody sends you an email and you really need to talk to them call them back just move to the other channel and ideally that will train them and if it doesn't train them still do it right like if then that that all gets worked out in email and then they send you another text two months later you're like i'm gonna respond an email again like you can send me texts fine great never gonna text you back i'm gonna go to email and i think that is a great policy i use a text expander snippet that just kind of explains why the nature of our relationship isn't good for texting and beautiful it works and people get it and and frankly you know people aren't dumb as

soon as you you kind of explain that they'll say okay that makes sense and you probably won't get a text from them again but maybe if their son gets a dui at 11 at night you will get a text and and then you'll deal with it so um i think you can manage it but but for me text messaging actually poses more trouble than the phone dust just because it's so imprecise um on the legal side i think i'm talking too much about the legal side on the nerd side of my life uh texting works okay too but even there i'm much more a fan of of working through slack channels and things like that. Like Katie and I run the Mac Power Users together,

and we decided like six months ago, we are no longer going to text each other about Mac Power Users business. We have a great Slack thing that we can work through. It keeps a record of everything. It's easy to follow. And now when we text each other, we know that somebody's sick. It's a big deal right text comes through right this is this goes back to something that um we can talk about when

we talk about email more too but it's this idea that there are these classic lines of communication that have been open for a very long time like texting and email we used to stuff every possible need into them because they were the only channels open. And now there are new channels. And one of the challenges, but I think real opportunity in terms of communicating is finding a better channel and pulling out the stuff that's better in that channel, moving it there. Because that helps both channels. that helps both channels. Like now your texts with Katie are better because you know, not only they more appropriate for texting, but like, you know, what kind of messages are going to come through in a text to or from Katie. And then your Slack conversation is now better because it's,

it's got that, uh, it's all searchable and it's in one particular place and you can have very specific notifications. And so it's better. So in the end, everything gets better. This is why I tell people my email is actually a lot better than it used to be because a lot of stuff that I used to do an email is somewhere else now where it's way better. And that makes the, you know, it's not only better there, but my email is better because that stuff that was not really in the right place is gone. So I love the idea that your texts with katie are better because i i felt that same way like i have most of the podcast coordination that i do happens in

slack now with individuals and with groups and we do that for this podcast too we send each other slack dms and uh and so yeah if i send you a text it's uh a different context than that. And I think that is right. I think that's the right way to do it. Well, I do think that if you're getting into this indie game, you've got to think about this stuff. Totally. Because telephones and text messages aren't going away. And let's talk about where we think this is all going. But before we do that, I wanted to talk about our second sponsor today, and that's our friends over at FreshBooks.

I wanted to talk about our second sponsor today, and that's our friends over at FreshBooks. To all you freelancers listening right now, if you could reclaim up to 192 hours of your precious time this year, would you? Our friends at FreshBooks make cloud accounting software for freelancers and free agents that's ridiculously easy to use, and they can help you do just that. By simplifying the tasks like invoicing, tracking expenses, and getting paid online, FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for over 10 million people to deal with their paperwork. One of the things I love about FreshBooks is they are just one of the leaders in this online billing stuff. They are always developing it and iterating upon it, and they've got so many people using the service that whatever problem you have, they've already solved it. You don't have to hire somebody and try and pay them to figure out the new problem. FreshBooks has it solved for you. They've got this new thing called the Notification Center, and it's like your personal assistant.

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And they do it in a nice professional way. They're not going to make your clients mad at you. The templates they use are very good, but even if you don't like them, you can go in and make changes to make it work just the way you want. So FreshBooks, now they have over 10 million users, but they've managed to stay pretty small company, landing them the title of small giant on Forbes list of best small companies this year. I mean, these guys are pros. Uh, if you're listening to this and not using FreshBooks yet, now is the time to try. They are offering an unrestricted 30 day free trial for listeners of this show. No credit card required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com slash free agents and enter free agents in the, how did you hear about us section? slash freeagents and enter freeagents in the How Did You Hear About Us section. We thank FreshBooks for all of their support of the show, and we also want to thank FreshBooks for helping a bunch of our listeners get paid, because we hear from you, and we know you do. That's right.

All right, so where is this stuff going, Jason? Are we going to be able to get away from these phones? I think about this. I do think about this i do think about i have a totally random story which is that my wife texted me actually from she and i my family and i text all the time right that's like separate from your work and it's very convenient and it's a lot a lot of logistics and things like that so that's why you're so protective of it right i mean if you get if you don't have all the clients texting you it's a client it's a family thing then it's it's a whole different context for you yeah so anyway she texts me um today and she sends me a picture

too and it's kind of a running joke in our our family based on a funny punchline from a comedian and and it's um in front of her at the grocery store is an old lady writing a check while she's checking out and she said you know it didn't take that long in the end but you had that moment when somebody's writing a check in front of you like like, oh my God. And it's always an old person because generally it's, and I have a story here, which is just to say, I feel like phones are going to fade away because they are an old person's, an older person's medium and younger people are more comfortable with texts and, uh, Slack and things like that. Right. Um, I don't think that email necessarily is going to go away entirely because you do need, we, we, we talked about the open door for that phone number, right? You can,

you can call me and email. Similarly, you can email me. You need open doors and a phone is an open door. Could you do an open door to a Google voice number? Yes. Could you do an open door to a Skype address? Yeah, I guess. I don't know. I got to feel like in the end, phones will fade away because it is this, the idea that there's this on-demand relationship where like literally think about it this way if i punch in the right series of numbers the right 10 digits i can like literally ring anybody's phone in the united states i can literally make a noise or vibration in their pocket of anybody anywhere that. That, like, the richest person, the most famous person, anybody. And I get their attention.

My understanding, this may not be true anymore, but my understanding is even earlier this year, you could, like, literally call the President of the United States because he hadn't given up his phone, and his friends would send him texts or call him and and I don't know if that's still true or if they finally were like this no don't do this um but that seems like misguided right that seems like a decision made 100 years ago or 80 years ago that is not how communication works today in this globally connected world but i feel like with so many other kind of legacy things we're going to be stuck with it

for a while as of generation that that has come to rely on the phone sort of like fades away and stops and if you've got older clients uh you're going to get that and less tech savvy clients you're still going to have to deal with it so i I don't think it's going away anytime soon. But I do think that it's, it's, it can be dealt with in a perhaps a way that 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, it couldn't be where you just had to kind of suck it up and deal with the fact that there was a phone sitting on your desk, and it might ring. Now we have, as we discussed in this episode, lots of technical ways to like, deal with it, process it, sp spoof it make it do what we want a little bit more and i've got to think that that will continue until it basically fades

away entirely i i see i don't think it's going to go entirely because there's certain things you get from a telephone conversation that you do not get from sending email or text but yeah but the open door of the phone is the thing that i'm not sure that will survive. Like, I have, I do, you know, I do phone calls with people. But at some point, it's no different than doing a Skype call or a FaceTime call. At some point, it's the consensual connection between two people where it's like, I need to hear your voice and you need to hear mine. And I think that will always have value. I, I, I do. And I think video will become more prevalent too, which is a problem if you're working in your garage or bedroom, um, that may, we may need some virtual office simulation software to evolve at that point. I don't think that's that far off. It'll spoof your background to make it look like you're in a place full of books or something. Yeah, yeah. But I do think that it's going to be much more of that consensual relationship. And the idea of a transom where any random person can see a series of numbers on a website or in a phone book or something and just ring a bell in the room where you're sitting, I think that's going to stop. I really do. I think that's going to stop. I really do. I think that's

going to stop. I think one of the best insights in the show was when you had talked about the channels of communication, because when I started as a young man in the law business, there were two ways to contact someone. You call them on the phone or you wrote them a letter. And then they added fax machines shortly after I started. And now I've literally lost count of the ways that you can contact somebody. And every day I read the tech press, there's a new way I can contact somebody. So I do think that you're right. And as people grow up with these technologies, they're more comfortable with them.

I didn't say earlier, but one of the reasons why I pay the money to Ruby is I have some older clients and they expect when they call their lawyer that a person that sounds fancy answers the phone. And that's an expectation they have. And if they don't get it, they're going to go find somebody else or that at least weighs into it for them. So but but these people growing up with these new technologies are going to abandon that stuff. So will I have a fancy person answering my phone in 10 years? I don't know. Maybe not. But will I have a phone?

Probably. But I do like the idea that these other avenues of communication, which are more appropriate for the context of the communication, is going to arise. And as a free agent, we have the ability to be the early movers on this stuff. We can adopt it. We're not talking about Slack today, but I've got a couple of clients that are very tech savvy that we have Slack channels and we do all our communication through Slack. And that's not something you're going to get with a big law firm.

I was going to ask, because I think that that's one of the things that if you've got more tech savvy people, Slack, although Slack's not cheap, I mean, there's a free version that does a whole lot. But if you pay, you get the ability to do private Slack groups and things like that. And it can be an option because it becomes at that point a private controlled text messaging environment. And if you've got clients who are comfortable with that, it can actually be a real boon because you're building a much more purposeful environment for that conversation instead of the looser, you know, just random text message to your phone kind of environment. Or even email. Or even email or even email yeah just as an example one of them i do a lot of contracts with and we did a contract a year ago and we we in that client we make a separate channel for every

new deal we work on and a year later the deal is starting to go a little sour and we were able to go back and look at our communication about specific points a year ago which was very easy in slack and not wouldn't be very easy in other ways, but we're, that's another discussion for another day. Yes. So I guess what we're saying is that the telephone isn't going away anytime soon, but it's maybe getting more manageable and I'll take that. Yeah. And I, and if you're starting out on your own, that, um, that you need to think about what your strategy is, if you need to have a contact number that's out there in the world and then how you process that. Cause you, the last and then how you process that because the last thing you want to do is put your put that put your cell phone number on your website or

in your signature of your email or anything like that you don't want to do that so think do people need to reach you by phone at all and if they do what's your approach going to be and where are you going to send them and and what response are they going to get when they get there are they going to get a robot are they going to send them and what response are they going to get when they get there? Are they going to get a robot? Are they going to get a person? And then also separately, think about how you're going to deal with text messages and what kinds of things do you want to do via text, if anything, and what do you want to push to another communications method? It's just worth thinking. These are things that deserve a little bit of your time as you're getting started or before you get started.

And if you're doing this today, think about that, too. Maybe there's a better way to handle your phone situation than you've got now. There are lots. It's surprising. In the last 10 years, there have been a whole lot of different technologies that have come up that are about what you were describing before, David, from everything from Google Voice to these services like Ruby, where a phone is a much more complex thing. You can remix it and do interesting things with it. And if you haven't thought about that,

you might want to think about that a little more. Maybe there's a better option for you than what you're living with now. And if you've got some thoughts or questions or experiences you want to share with us, you know where that feedback show will come up at some point. And I think this is great fodder for it. So let us know. Yeah, you can go to relay.fm slash free agents. And there's an email link that sends email to me and to David, you can also go to free agents FM on Twitter and tweet at us. And you can go

to our Facebook group, where there are lots of other people who are in the same boat as you who are happy to talk to you. And that is facebook.com slash groups slash free agents group, one word. And so plenty of different ways to reach us and your fellow free agents. And we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Free Agents. But until then, David, it has been a pleasure as always. Yes, and thanks to our sponsors, Timing and FreshBooks.

And we'll see you all in a fortnight. Bye-bye. Thank you.