One day, a colleague, buzzed me in Skype and reminded me about a favour that I promised to do for him. Buried with a lot of deadlines, I turned to being unmindful and replied “I am busy. I will do it later!” I could sense a mixed feeling of guilt and annoyance across the cloud albeit our unemotional textual conversation. I just realised later on that my reply was senseless and selfish. In this modern world, everyone is busy. Who am I to earn the rights to say that I am busy and consequently implied that I am busier than him?

In another occasion, I had a conversation with a business partner of ours. They are not exclusive in business to ours. As part of their internal policy, for any particular project, they have to put several options on the table to decide who they will go with. The sales VP said to me that he preferred to work with our organization simply because he rarely got a prompt response from another partner, our competitor. A few times when he asked for a business proposal, the guy who represented the other partner said that he was busy with other inquiries that came first and that he was serving hundreds of customers, literally. Happy as I was to hear that, one ugly strike to our competitor, I felt a deep sympathy nevertheless. This is absolutely something that I hope I won’t get around to saying it under any circumstances, especially to valuable partner. If you are too busy handling projects, then maybe you already have so much on your plate and that you should stop taking anymore.

We are all equally busy and saying that you are busy to someone else basically implying that he doesn’t deserve your time. Each of us needs to juggle with many things, set priorities, and more often than not, has to tune out from our surroundings to focus on what is in our hand. Not all of us are good at multitasking and some researches show that human is not designed to do multitasking. We need to have an interruption-prevention strategy and many business articles have explored on that. It is not wrong to put off our colleagues’ and partners’ request until later time based on our priorities. It is just that we have to delivery the message skilfully so that it won’t end up being taken wrongly. Taken wrongly, you may get scorns from your colleague or, to the bigger extent, lose a valuable partner or customer.

On the other side, it is a good practice to ask if our conversation partner has time or if it is convenient to talk. Reply it nicely. you may say that it is not a good time to talk with the promise that you’ll get back to him later. Saying that you are overloaded or extremely busy may backfire into perceptions that you don’t manage your time well. It is also against the wisdom that we should work smart not hard.

So do you have time to talk to me or shall I call you back?