People text me at all hours. How should I worship leader deal with constant communication?
(Transcript)
Question:
How do you practically put limitations on your personal access with team members, pastors, etc.? I'm a volunteer that oversees our creative teams, and I'm contacted via text and telephone about ministry stuff all days of the week, all hours of the day and evening.
I've even been on vacation and gotten texted about ministry stuff that starts like, "Hey, I know you're on vacation, but hoping you can clarify a certain ministry issue here."
I know that boundaries are important, and I always respect my teammates and pastors when it comes to office hours and family time, but trying to help others understand those boundaries when it comes to myself has proven to be challenging. I need to be able to be home or on vacation and have ministry responsibilities turned off so I can fully focus on my family.
Any advice is appreciated!
Answer:
The struggle of being in ministry where emergencies seem to pop up every day, don't they? And people text you, and it's always the smallest stuff that's not actually an emergency.
And so, we get these texts at all hours of the night. I've been there. I've gotten texts. And the way that I have dealt with it is realizing that the pressure that I feel to respond to the texts and the phone calls is probably 75% in my head and only 25% from other people. Which is actually really good news because that means that it's something that you can control. All you have to do is change your thought process about how you respond to things.
The Pressure to Respond: Internal vs. External
What I mean by that is that we tell ourselves that because this person texted me, they want an immediate response right now. When in reality, if you just didn't text back until the next day, what's going to happen? That person will be like, "Oh, this person just texted back when they had time."
So, I think a lot of the times, this pressure that we feel—at least this is what I felt in the past—is that the pressure that we feel is not from other people. It is a pressure that we put on ourselves because we think it's what other people think. We think that other people expect an immediate response, and maybe sometimes they do, but do they deserve an immediate response? No, they do not.
Reframing Communication Expectations
This device has given people instant access to us. At a moment's notice, a notification can pop up on the screen and ruin our entire night. And so, the problem is not necessarily that people are reaching out to us at all hours of the night. The problem is that we tell ourselves that they deserve an immediate response.
I would like us to start thinking about communication on this device as not just email, but postal mail. I say that because I probably could have used to say email, but now we have email on our phone, and we get notifications on our phone that we got an email, and our email has become our text messaging. We need to view it as somebody coming by our office with a note and putting it on the desk.
The "Office Note" Analogy
What that means is that if I am in the office from 9:00 to 5:00, after 5:00, if you lay a note on my desk, I'm not going to see it, and you are not going to get a response until the next morning.
Now, if the messages we received actually happen in that way, then what would the expectation be of the person who put it there? They wouldn't expect you to answer it until you got back into the office the next day, right? And they would not expect an immediate response either. They would expect you to get to it whenever you can.
That is how life works, but for some reason, we think that everybody needs instant access to us, and just because something popped up on my phone, I need to answer it right away.
This is something that I'm passionate about because I have felt the effects of this over and over again, and I feel that pressure from people that we need to answer things instantly, but it is not actually there. I don't think many times. People will wait if you make them wait, and they will probably be fine with it.
Practical Steps to Reclaim Your Time
There are messages I haven't responded to for a couple of days, and then I text them back, and people are just like, "Thank you." And you know what? I don't really care if they're disappointed or not because those are unrealistic expectations that I need to respond to everything instantly.
So, that is the first thing I say that because I think that that's the biggest thing. A lot of these pressures are internal pressures and not external pressures. It's how we are falsely perceiving things.
Now, some practical things you can do:
For the love of God, turn off the push notifications from Instagram, from Facebook, from your email. That is the first thing. You should not be seeing those things at all hours of the day. Turn them off. If you need to see them, they're still there. You just click on the app, but you do not need to be interrupted. Nothing is that important will come across from Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, or email. If people are using those avenues of communication for an important thing, then that's on them. They need to find a new avenue of communication because those are not appropriate methods of communicating important matters that need to be addressed urgently. So, turn push notifications off. I'm begging you, please. It will save your life. You should not have 37 push notifications on your phone every time you look at your phone. No wonder we're all anxious and going insane.
Number two, I do not have this on me at all times. And I understand some people, like if you have a family, right? Like you want to be in touch with your kids and your spouse. I don't have those things, so I can probably get away with it a little bit more, but I'm just telling you, there has been so much freedom in leaving this in another room for two hours sometimes. Treat not just the apps on your phone as I've checked them when I need them, but treat your phone as something as I check it when I need it. I don't know if you know this, but for oh gee, how long has it been now? Probably 7, 500 years at least. No, 7,900 years, or I don't know, since the beginning of human existence, people have survived, and they have not had instant access to other people in the world. They have not been connected even with their family members, and people have survived. So, put your phone down. People don't need instant access to you all the time. Just try it one day. One day a week, on Mondays from 9:00 to 11:00, I'm going to leave my phone in another room, and I'm going to work on whatever I need to work on. Now you're talking about with your family. If your entire family, everybody that you care about and love, is in the room with you, leave your phone in another room. That is no longer an excuse that my kid is out wherever, and I need to know when to pick them up, and they're going to text me. So, identify those moments. Leave your phone in another room.
And then the final practical piece of advice is this app right here, or something similar to it. It's called App Block, and what it does is it blocks apps. And so, what I like about it is that I can set up times here. All of those are times that I've set up to block these apps, and so I'm not distracted by Facebook or Instagram from 9:00 to 12:00 in the morning every day. During the nights, I block email. I block some other things that I use for Leading Worship Well, and during the weekend, I block the same things as well. And so that keeps me from working at night. You do not need to check your email after 5:00. Nothing comes into your email inbox after 5:00 that needs to be answered until the next morning. And if it does, once again, that person is wrong who sent it to you because that is not how you communicate those things with people.
Setting Boundaries with Others
I know that that was like a million things, but this is something that I'm passionate about because it drives me crazy because it has driven me crazy in the past. So, try some of those things and free yourself from your own expectation that people are expecting you to respond to everything instantly.
Oh, and then one more thing is if that is you, and those things still do not work, and people do get upset, even though that's only like 25% of the problem, 75% of the problem is our own thoughts of what things should be like, but if people do get upset, set the boundaries with them. And all you have to do, you don't have to be mean about it, but and I've told people this before, tell them, "If you text me or call me after 5:00 PM or whenever your work hour is that you want to be done, you will not get a response until the next morning." And if people do not respect that, then they are the unhealthy ones, not you, and you don't have to bow to their unhealthiness and their expectations that are unreasonable.
