24 Things To Do On A Boring Conference Call
I’ll never look at multitasking the same way again. A few years ago, I had to take a business trip to Boston. I was still nursing a baby, which meant I had to pump milk while I was gone. I also had a long conference call I was supposed to be on just before the Boston meeting was to begin. Rather than taking the plane (nowhere to pump, no cell phone service) or the train (almost as bad), I decided to drive the four hours to Boston. A few minutes before the conference call began, I pulled over and set up the breast pump, which I had plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter. I covered myself with a large shawl. Then I dialed into the call, routed the call through the car radio (thank you, Bluetooth), pulled back onto I-95, and hoped to dear god I wouldn’t get pulled over. Eight ounces of milk and one conference call later, I was pulling up to a very nice hotel in Cambridge.
I’m never doing that much multitasking again if I can help it. But there’s no point in letting all that time on conference calls go to waste, either. Here are some less extreme ways to help the calls fly by—and get stuff done.
- Buy gifts, send flowers. This is the perfect time to take care of the baby gift, the wedding gift, the birthday present, you name it. Buy it online, have it wrapped and shipped to the recipient, and you’re done. And feeling virtuous.
- Put up your feet and blow bubbles.
- Drive. If you have to visit a customer or have other business travel coming up, and you’ve got a good cell phone connection, try to take the call from your (Bluetooth-enabled, I hope) car.
- Knit. Knitting can make your commute a whole lot more bearable, too.
- Look at great art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Web site is my favorite for looking at current exhibitions online. For rarely-exhibited masterworks, try the Art Institute of Chicago.
- Plan the next vacation. I feel like I could grow old just waiting for pages on travel sites to load. But with someone from marketing droning on in the background, that swirling pinwheel on my screen starts to seem almost Zen-like.
- Learn origami. Fold a better paper airplane.
- Clean your desk.
- Email an old friend. Ask how they are.
- Plan a surprise for a best friend, a significant other, a family member, or anyone else who could use one.
- Do crosswords online.
- Write thank-you notes.
- Read the newspaper online.
- Become a telephone virtuoso. Got a colleague whose birthday is coming up? Wow them with 112163 112196 1108663, 008121—on a separate phone line, of course.
- Window shop online.
- Browse epicurious.com and allrecipes.com, and plan your meals for the week. Then order groceries online and have them delivered.
- File, if you still have paper files.
- Make a photo book at Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Blurb. These are shockingly time-consuming. If you’re on a conference call, that won’t bother you one bit.
- Pace. Get the blood flowing.
- Been meaning to change your 401k contributions? Now’s the time.
- Watch TED talks.
- Read the poem of the day at the Poetry Foundation.
- Make all your doctor’s appointments for the year.
- Resolve an irritating customer service issue. Use another line to call anyone who is guaranteed to have you sitting on hold, such as your bank or health insurer. It’s black-belt multitasking to have your conference call end just as the real live customer service rep picks up the other line, but if you’ve already completed the other 23 things on this list, we’re sure you can do it.
Next up: Things to Do On a Boring Conference Call—Home Office Edition. Here, the possibilities are truly endless.—KW
By A Web Design
