We don't call places anymore; we call people

The company I work for decided to give their senior account executives a training course for 2 days on Stress, Time, and Meeting Management. It was a very interesting and fun two days I must say; I didnt expect to enjoy it as much as I did. I think that in the past 6 months I had been going through alot of changes in my life but didn't take the time to sit with myself and think about how I was choosing to respond to them. As we call it in AIESEC, I didnt get a chance to self-reflect. I was sorta pushing everything to the back of my mind and moving on; responding every now and then to a little bit of it at a time. So having this training put a spotlight on that behaviour and made me more aware of it. I saw alot of me in what our Scottish trainer was saying; being so stressed out at the office that I'd go home and couldn't even stand having small talks with our friends and family. And yet even though we were very stressed, we didnt learn the simple art of saying NO! Not all client requests are reasonable, not all social gatherings are necessary; prioritizing and giving yourself the space to do a good job was a necessity. Saying yes to everything means you are stressing yourself, the rest of the agency, and making the clients and people around you expect the "yes" always! I will write an entry concerning what we were trained to do in the workplace but here I wanted to point out a definite stress creating phenomena that we are all living with now; cell phones. They are a huge source of interruption in our daily lives. You'd be concentrating on something and the phone rings and you MUST answer it. This need to answer creates stress BIG time. You feel you have nowhere to hide. This is, as the trainer described it, due to the ability for us now to call PEOPLE rather than PLACES. In the past, you'd call a house or an office. If the person you were looking for was in a meeting or not at his desk you just simply had to call back or leave a message but now they call YOU directly not your workplace so no matter where you are they find you. Can you imagine the amount of stress that causes? The amount of interruption while you are trying to concentrate on something! Its unbelievable! Abroad they deal with it through voicemail; if you are busy working on a document or are in a meeting, you just let the voicemail answer your calls so you can finish what you are doing, listen to the voicemail, and prepare a response before calling back. This solution gives you space to breathe and allows you to concentrate but again, I did live in canada and people abuse voicemail there; people rarely pick up their phones! They let voicemail get everything and they call you back when they feel like it which can be frustrating if you need something urgently but at the same time it shows you the severity of the situation. What I found myself doing in response is choosing NOT to answer phone calls in outings/meetings so I can be really present in them. Plus, at work, I see who's calling and try to think of what that client may want. If its urgent I pick up right away, if its something I still have no updates on, I dont answer and call back when its completed. You need to give yourself room to breathe, and space to be able to really be there in the place or event you are in. Phones even invade our rest time! You are on the pool trying to get a nap, clear your mind, enjoy the sun, then your damn phone rings and you feel that you MUST answer! Why? Just put your phone on silent and call back when you are done relaxing; pretend people called you at home or at the office and didn't find you there. We all can enjoy moments in our lives without these interruptions if we put our mind to it.