Eira Tansey

Learning how to ask a busy person for something is a skill that few people are taught. It encompasses a range of personal and business etiquette skills. I am a busy person who often has to ask other busy people for things. Busy people ask me for things. People who are not busy also ask me for things. I have totally screwed up asking a busy person for something, so I am also speaking from experience. My husband likes to tease me by saying I am obsessed with RULES!!!! but sometimes I suspect people are craving for someone to write down all of these unspoken norms. So let’s talk about what works and what doesn’t.

Before I share my own practices and preferences, a few caveats: I am a white Midwestern woman in my late thirties who grew up in a lower middle-class family with parents who worked in non-profits and education. I was a weird kid who would occasionally read Emily Post etiquette books, and to this day have a tendency to over-research new situations so I am prepared for all possible outcomes. I am also a Quaker and put disproportionate emphasis on integrity and equality which can sometimes be at odds with traditional etiquette practices. After working 15 years in a salaried role, I switched to self-employment almost two years ago, and that has also shifted some of my thinking regarding what is an appropriate and inappropriate ask depending on one’s employment status (more on this here).

This advice is likely most useful to folks working in North American libraries, education, nonprofit, and similar work. It is also written mainly for those who do not have a close preexisting relationship with the person you are asking. Once you have an established relationship with someone, you generally have a mutually negotiated level of trust and communication preferences that will likely be much more flexible than how you communicate with strangers or acquaintances. By the way, if you’re interested in this topic from the point of view of others, here are a couple articles from guys in venture capital and tech.

What is fine with me may be anathema to someone else. For example, I do not have strong personal preferences about honorifics and when to address people as “Dear Dr./Ms./Mr./Mx. Last Name” versus “Dear First Name,” as Quakers have a long historical tradition of avoiding honorifics and titles. However, plenty of other busy people value these titles and honorifics for very understandable cultural reasons.

Bottom line: etiquette is both an intensely cultural phenomenon and also very situational.

THE BASICS

The more upfront work you put into your ask and the more you anticipate the possible questions your busy person might have, the more likely you will get a quick response and potentially a yes. Show that you have done your homework by making it clear why you are asking me in particular, or that you’ve done some basic information gathering before reaching out. While the secret to being viewed as extremely competent is having good scripts you can adapt for all sorts of situations (I have several Google Template responses that I use in my working life), I like to see that your ask was at least personalized for why I’m being asked and not some other random person. Do this by presenting as much information as you can as concisely as possible. Do not be vague.

Here are typical examples of vague requests I get:

• “I am thinking about becoming an archivist. Can you talk to me about your career path?”
• “I want to put together a panel for next year’s conference about archives and social justice. Will you be on it?”
• “I am working on a committee project about libraries and climate change. Can I ask for your thoughts?”

These are vague asks because they do not have the level of detail that my over-scheduled, spreadsheet-driven, calendar-addicted, beyond caricature Capricorn brain needs in order to give you a quick response. By being vague, the requester has transferred executive function responsibility on to me to ask questions that could have been answered in their opening ask. Now it’s my responsibility to have to ask all sorts of questions about scheduling, how much time it will take, what kind of role you are planning to play, and, if a considerable amount of my time is involved and it isn’t obviously a potential business conversation, what stipend or other benefits are on the table.

Really busy people will often ignore these vague asks because they are so swamped that it’s not worth their time to try to get those additional details. I am a recovering people pleaser so I try hard to at least acknowledge every ask I get (sometimes I fail! My inbox was seriously in chaos mode for much of last year when I was hospitalized and experienced a concurrent death of a parent, and then months later experienced multiple hospitalizations of another parent!!!!), but I also keep a vast mental Rolodex (did you know they actually still sell these) on the vibes of the asks I receive. A very specific and tightly written ask signals “this person is on my wavelength and even if we can’t make it work now, I want to leave the door open for the future” and I’m much more likely to send an enthusiastic response or suggestion if I cannot say yes in their timeframe.

Here is how I prefer that a vague ask would be rewritten:

• “I am thinking about becoming an archivist and have started to apply to library schools. I have been a circulation desk student worker at Regional University library and my supervisor recently shared a webinar you gave to Regional Archives Association about climate change and archives that appealed to me because I am involved with my neighborhood community garden. Do you have time next Wednesday or Friday afternoon so I can ask you some questions about what library school courses would be helpful for an archives career?”
• “I want to put together a panel for next year’s conference about archives and social justice. The conference is scheduled to be in November 2024 in Nashville and the proposal deadline is in two months. I am currently seeking a speaker on climate change. I envision a 45-minute panel of three speakers who will have 10 minutes each with time for Q&A, and I think a short summary of the themes from A Green New Deal for Archives would be great. The conference is only occurring in-person, so this would require travel on your part. Would you be interested? If so, let me know and I’ll send out a Doodle poll for a one-hour planning meeting next month once I confirm other speakers.”
• “I am on Fancy University Library’s new committee on sustainability. We are collaborating with the Fancy University climate justice student activist group on a day-long event scheduled for this fall. We are wondering whether you might be interested in teaching a workshop on historical research and climate change activism since many of these students are interested in archives. We do not have a final budget, but our Dean has indicated her tentative support for the project. Our committee is meeting next Thursday afternoon to discuss event planning if you are able to join us for 20 minutes, or feel free to send us a scheduling link if that time is not good for you.”

Now, with all these examples, I won’t necessarily say yes, but it gives me virtually all the information I need to send back a useful response so you aren’t left hanging. This level of detail allows me to check my calendar to determine if I am available, and if I am available, if it’s worth spending my time on. And if I cannot make it work, or if it’s not a good fit for any number of reasons, I also have enough context to offer some suggested resources or alternative contacts.

SCHEDULING BEST PRACTICES

You’ll notice in all my rewritten asks above, the asker took a proactive approach to scheduling. Open-ended requests with “I know you’re busy so let me know what time works best for you” probably sounds polite but it doesn’t work with a busy person like me (who does not have anyone managing my calendar for me but a girl can dream) because it actually puts more work on me to go in and identify which of my few open slots over the next few weeks I want to offer up (not knowing if when I do, it’ll turn out not to be a good time for you and it will turn into an irritating scheduling back and forth). If you throw out a few dates, then I can quickly check my calendar and get back to you.

When you are asking someone to do a thing, you need to be prepared to assume the responsibility of all scheduling logistics unless they go out of their way to indicate it is something they would prefer to handle. Once someone responds to your request, be proactive in setting up a calendar invitation with all the information they need to connect with you (like a Zoom or Google Meet link, or what number you’ll be calling from if it’s an old-fashioned phone call) and email it to them as quickly as you humanly can. I usually like to send the same logistical information in an emailed response to the last email I received from them since sometimes people don’t always use calendaring systems, and it never hurts to have meeting information like time/date/Zoom link in multiple places.

If you are asking a busy person to do something in a group and this requires the use of something like Doodle or WhenIsGood for everyone to declare their availability within a specific span of days/weeks/months, then please use these services responsibly and with mercy. Nothing drives me more absolutely bananas than holding several slots open on my calendar for more than a few days. Reliance on Doodle polls that stretch out for way too long for everyone to respond is getting so completely out of hand in library circles that I purposely under-report my availability. This way I am not locking up a bunch of my calendar unnecessarily, especially because this is often an unpaid commitment that could otherwise be potentially billable time. As a self-employed person, time is my primary inventory. Asking for someone’s availability has a very short statute of limitations: it is rude to ask for people’s availability and then not act as quickly as you can, since they may have put a schedule hold on their calendar while waiting for you to make a final decision. Here’s how to responsibly ask a group for their availability:

1. Provide everyone a deadline to respond to the scheduling poll and keep it short (like a week or 5 business days)
2. Do not offer 20,000 time slot choices. I think once you offer more than 5 days for people to pick from, you’re getting into decision fatigue zone. People are so worried about including every single person’s scheduling constraints that they forget about the tyranny of choice. This is why we have minutes, so if one person on a committee can’t make it, you can send them a recap of what they missed.
3. Enforce your deadline by sending out a “one last day to respond” reminder to the group, and then send everyone a calendar invitation with the Zoom/meeting info inside. Also, try to send out information separate from the calendar invitation about what you’d like those who cannot attend to do if they cannot make it. If someone declines your calendar invitation due to availability, they will not have access to any agendas/notes if this is the only place you linked these items.

Let’s talk about the use of scheduling links. You should be aware that that the use of scheduling links is subject to a lot of business etiquette debate at the current moment. Calendly is probably the most famous scheduling tool, but they basically all work the same. You select a time from a busy person’s calendar (they have already determined their windows of availability in which they are willing to take meetings) and typically you then receive a Zoom or Google Meet link, either automatically or once they have approved your request.

I don’t necessarily mind an ask that directs me to a scheduling link, however I appreciate when it is worded thoughtfully, especially because not everyone is into scheduling link culture and it can otherwise come across as a bit presumptuous (like placing a call to someone then immediately putting them on hold). A good way to phrase this would be “If you are interested, does Wednesday afternoon work? I am wide open that afternoon, but if you are not available, please feel free to use my Calendly link, or if you have your own scheduling link, feel free to send it to me.”

Really busy people often have assistants, and this is great news for you if they confirm their interest, because assistants are amazing and incredible professionals who spend their days juggling really busy people’s calendars for a living. In general Quakers frown on playing the lottery, but if I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I would win, I would do it (sorry God!) so I could hire someone to be my assistant and handle all of this for me. The really busy person will typically either forward your request to their assistant or copy them in, and then you can take your cues from there. Sometimes assistants screen incoming email for whoever’s calendar they manage, so it’s possible they’ve already been in the loop from the second your email hit the busy person’s inbox. You never know who is reading and forwarding your emails besides the addressed recipient, so always be polite and courteous.

Finally, I can’t believe I have to say this but apparently I do: always, always, ALWAYS send a thank you communication after the busy person follows through. I don’t really care if it’s email, snail mail, or a passenger pigeon brought back from extinction through some questionable genetic science. I try to give freely and try very very hard not to keep score, and I can also tell you that I have done things like written recommendation letters, given talks to classes, and made key business introductions and never received any kind of follow up. That bums me out! There’s no reason not to send a quick thank you email. In an age of AI writing prompts, you have no more excuses, sorry. You can even ask ChatGPT or Google Gemini something like “Please help me write a thank you note to a very uptight Capricorn who has a weird obsession with rules to express my appreciation for something they did.”

SEE YOU IN MY INBOX!!!!

Share your thoughts on this

Part 1: The shutdown of the Archives & Archivists listserv

Part 2: The landscape of archivist professional dialogue

After spending a lot of time thinking about what the current state of archivist discourse is like, I started thinking about how much more and better and varied it could be. So, this last post in this series is a bit of a wishlist of things I want to see develop over the coming years.

Let’s start planting some seeds, archivists.

We need to increase the amount of conversation in general and with more archivists’ voices at the table. 

It’s striking to me how few archivists are engaged in public conversation about the profession. I wish it were a professional norm among everyone to engage in active conversations about the nature of our work, and yet there are many archivists out there who are not participating in these conversations whatsoever. As a result, the same voices dominate conversations about digital preservation, archival social justice, metadata, DACS, copyright, etc etc.  I personally find this really baffling. Sometimes I get the sense that lots of people are listening, and reading but not… contributing. Why is this? Is it because they feel like they don’t have something to contribute? Is it because we’re afraid to critique others’ ideas? I often hear anecdotal evidence that people are “not supported” in their jobs to read and write, but I also don’t know of many archivists who are working in a billable hours environment.

Divest our dialogue from platforms owned by profit-oriented companies.

This is a big one for me because I am planning to leave Twitter soon, and the only reason I haven’t quit sooner is because Archivist Twitter brings me a lot of joy and information.

I don’t really know what the answer to this is. Could we go back to 2005 with everyone owning their own domain, when people read blogs and left really thoughtful comments on them, and our main hits of new information came via RSS, and that was the main internet discourse? I know that that environment had its issues, but I miss how non-monetized it was and how people didn’t give a shit about their brand and how it was SLOW. I guess I can dream. I personally want to revive Reading Archivists.

We need a renewed emphasis on the public implications of institutional recordkeeping, especially by governments.

I am a bit skeptical of the recent emphasis on collecting social justice from demonstrations and private parties as the major expression of archival social justice (and I say this as someone who is active in some of those efforts). In my opinion, the greatest impact we could have on effecting social justice through recordkeeping is to assert the public interest on records issues – like demanding consistent access to law enforcement records, pushing against the creation of surveillance records, and so on.

Millions of people are affected by records that will never be transferred to an archival repository. These are also the same records that will disproportionately affect marginalized communities. Archivists need to be active participants in these efforts, and right now, we generally are not.

We need the voices of government and corporate archivists in our professional dialogues.

I’m not the first archivist to observe how atomized our already small profession is, and how dominated by university affiliations the general makeup of the Society of American Archivists has been. Clearly many archivists have found organizational homes elsewhere that meet their needs more than SAA. I don’t blame them, but I still miss their voices. As a past Nominating Committee member, and a current chair of the SAA Records Management Section, I’ve seen how much the domination of academic archivists within SAA has pernicious underdiscussed effects. While I’m an academic archivist myself, a huge part of my work is informed by public records issues. It is stunning to me how many archivists within SAA spaces do not understand extremely basic information about FOIA and the way state records issues depart from federal records issues, and I think this is because we do not hear from government archivists as often as we hear from academic archivists within archival discourse.

This would be kind of amusing if it weren’t such an obstacle for our profession. The worst is during the inevitable “politicians who fuck up their recordkeeping obligations.” I’ve seen SAA leaders, who come from an academic background, sharing information that blatantly is contradictory to NARA policy. How the hell are we supposed to advocate for the archival profession when we can’t even get our news stories right?

We need ways for great minds that think alike to find each other for collaboration

Much like finding a way to divest from profit-driven platforms, this one is a bit of a head-scratcher but I still feel strongly about it. I’m pretty well-connected and know who to ask if I’m thinking about starting a new project and want to find collaborators. But this takes a really long time to figure this out for new professionals and it shouldn’t have to be this hard. I wish there was a universal matchmaking directory where people could say “here are the projects I’m working on, I’m looking for collaborators to help me with this part” and then we could all be doing fun amazing things together.

We need more archivists to represent our profession outside of our profession

As my interests have drifted towards environmental issues, I’ve started to attend conferences in other fields. I’ve also published in non-archives journals. And it’s the best thing ever. I realize that flexible conference funding is a huge area of privilege, and I wish I had a good answer for how to start solving this. But I strongly encourage other archivists within whatever capacity they have to present to, work with, and write for non-archivist audiences when possible. It helps us learn how to talk about what we do to people who have no idea what we do (or at history conferences, people who think they know what we do), and often times non-archivists get super-excited about your work when you talk about it, which is lovely and affirming.

What’s on your archives dialogue wishlist?

 

 

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<standard disclaimer about these only being my own views>

If you’re an archivist active on Twitter and/or in SAA, you probably know about the #thatdarnlist brouhaha and the recent discussions over the SAA code of conduct. I’ve mostly stayed on the public sidelines of these discussions for many reasons. However, something I’ve observed* is the idea that those pushing for new approaches to the listserv and/or the code of conduct are newbies to the profession who have an ax to grind, and should turn their attention to real issues.

Let’s be clear: using someone’s professional status as a newbie to dismiss their concerns is one of the most toxic attitudes established professionals can transmit to their newer, typically younger, often more professionally vulnerable colleagues. And if anyone is wondering about my own consistency, I believe ageism is one of the few (only?) -isms that actually cuts in two directions, and have asked people not to use language such as “old guard” which I feel is decidedly uncool. We are at our strongest when we realize our challenges are truly multi-generational.

Perhaps I find dismissive attitudes to the concerns of newbies so disturbing because I’m going through my own period of professional transformation. I still very much identify as a new archivist, and only graduated in 2012. On the other hand, I’m lucky to have started a professional position last year, and have leadership roles in the profession. This means I no longer feel quite like the very new, very shaky baby archivist I was just a few years ago. Numerous established archivists have graciously shared their knowledge, contacts, stories, and ideas with me, and I am profoundly grateful for their generosity. It’s made my transition to a professional career undeniably easier knowing that sound advice is a phone call or email away. The overwhelming majority of archivists I’ve dealt with are supportive and caring colleagues.

And this is the way it should be, for everyone. Using someone’s length of time in the profession, whether measured in decades or months, as a proxy for the validity of their ideas, is intellectually lazy. Ideas should stand or fall on their own merits, not on the CV length of those supporting or arguing against them. This is why the concept of blind review continues to hold weight in academic publishing.

Let’s talk for a minute about institutional (or perhaps more accurately, professional-organizational) knowledge. This often gets mixed up with the idea that newbies don’t know what they’re talking about, because they don’t remember “The Great Battle of What-Have-You in Fill-in-the-year”:

1. Let’s reject the idea that time in the profession is a barrier to understanding the broad scope of institutional history. Yes, it’s different if you were there in person. There’s no way lived experience can be replicated for someone who wasn’t there. That doesn’t mean those of us who weren’t there aren’t capable of reading back through the literature, talking to our mentors, and learning about long-standing professional areas of disagreement. Put me on your archival history pub quiz team, I’ll take Committee for the 1970’s for $400, Alex.

2. Recognize there is a line between saying, “Hey, here’s what happened the last time our profession addressed this issue, and here were the outcomes. You should understand this and have this information going forward if you decide this is a battle worth your time” versus saying “Hey, here’s what happened the last time our profession addressed this issue, and it never worked out, therefore your ideas are not worth considering.” We are a profession that ostensibly professes to be open to change, to new ideas, and to incorporating the voices of those not often heard in the public when it comes to building the archival record. It’s time to do the same with the way we think about concepts of professionalism. Even in perennial points of argument, the factors around unresolved issues change with each generation.

In closing…The archival record is only as good as the archivists charged to care for it. Archivists who are told their voices are not worth listening to because they are new will have difficulties developing into the thoughtful leaders we need. And we desperately need to grow these leaders to fight for the continued survival of our profession and our institutions.

*for those unaware of my MO, I do not single out or link to specific examples on my own website, and would appreciate the same within the comments

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