Being a geek comma blogger might make you think I’m about to release a “yay for web standards” cheer. But the accessibility I’m referring to here, now has nothing to do with web standards or semantic code or anything techno-logical. It has to do with making yourself accessible, and how that can make you inaccessible.
Making yourself accessible means opening yourself wide to outside forces that can quickly take over your day. You can be partially accessible and still have partial control over your day, but there is a point (and I am well past it) where you begin to be owned by other people’s emergencies.
I don’t own my own time. It’s clear that my day is not built around my flow. I’m on the phone more than once per hour. I’m reacting to 200 emails in a day. I’m in long meetings long before I’ve found my chi (that’s like noon on a good day.) And all the while I’m trying to develop.
So if you’re pitching the idea of personal accessibility as a feature, you might consider how that feature scales. From my own experience, I’d say it doesn’t take long before it breaks. Being accessible is a contradiction in terms (being engaged by one client means you’re blocked from the next.)
Being accessible isn’t efficient.
The voice in my head tells me it’s time to get back my time. Schedule my accessibility. Plug in rational expectation filters. Trim the attention sails. Embrace my flow. Develop.
The link in there is Oberkirch. Worth the read.