Wish I could have this feature on my Phone
I am certain that there is a high chance that the reader of this article is working from home during these unprecedented times. Interestingly, in India, when the Lockdown began around March 25, there was a 15–20% increase in voice calls through mobile phones. No doubt, working from home and, catching up with family and friends were the top contributors to this increase.
A lot of people have already listed numerous pros and cons of working from home. Right from increased flexibility, and focused meetings to lesser commute time, and increased time with family, and many more.
One of the challenges that I felt personally while working extensively from home was to let others know about my schedule apart from my work schedule.
You can always block your calendar with meetings and con-calls. But, can you block your calendar for having lunch? It is not practically possible to sit on your chair or bed and work continuously for long hours. There are times when personal work such as grocery shopping, house chores, lunch, a short nap, a quick game, and cooking may take up your WFM time. We have to realize that it’s a home, not an office. Hence, there are bound to be activities other than office work.
How would you feel if you had the option to manually set-up your status in your phone just like status in Slack, in Microsoft Teams or even Skype? Even though, such collaboration tools have taken precedence over our primary communication method of mobile phone, I feel that the same feature should apply to the mobile phone as well.
Let’s take an example. Imagine a Monday morning, which is expected to go insanely packed and hence, consuming your 1 Hour of lunch as well. When you are planning out your day in the morning, assume you have the feature in your phone to set 14:00 Hrs to 15:00 Hrs as your lunchtime, considering you have no meeting during this time. You set the status as ‘Having lunch’ and block your time from 14:00 Hrs — 15:00 Hrs.
Now, let’s assume your colleague is trying to call you during your designated lunch hour. As soon as he calls, he gets an automated reply saying “Mr. X is having lunch. Please call after 15:00 Hrs.”
As you can see, it would have been so much more helpful for both of them. For Mr. X, he can peacefully have his lunch. On the other hand, For Mr. Y (his colleague), he saved his time because either Mr. X would have told him to call back a little later, or Mr. X while speaking to him would not have given his full attention eventually affecting his opinion on Mr. Y’s query.
Similarly, there can be many such examples where this idea can be replicated. Be it during a workout, while having dinner/breakfast, doing shopping, going to a hospital, or anything else. It just depends on what you set the status as. Technologies like text-to-speech can easily take care of the rest. At the end, integrating both the work schedule and personal schedule can help bifurcate a user’s day much more clearly and help correct his/her work life balance.
Hence, to conclude, adding a feature to set your status in a mobile phone which the telecom operator can reply as a speech/text to the person calling could be a great way to improve the user’s experience and eventually, make the communication more productive. Additionally, this could also help decongest the network and benefit all the users in the network.
The above mentioned is just an idea and more of an hypothesis to solve the problem. Definitely, it would require validation, more research in terms of technical feasibility, and vetting with the regulatory authorities.
As always, I would love to know your opinion. What do you think about this feature? Can we solve this problem in a different way? Let me know it in the comments below.
Cheers!!
