Who did not already need to cope with them: Fellow men, colleagues or even clients who are always trying to catch your attention, seeming to do anything to gain it and dramatically consume your valuable time. I keep on questioning myself, how to deal with those characters? If it happens to be within your circle of friends or acquaintances you might use a more relaxed approach of dealing with or even avoiding them.
In a professional business context this is in my opinion a more challenging situation as avoidance or winding down contacts are no suitable options to be chosen. What I did is setting up a (short) agenda for each planned contact, giving points that needed discussion and those who needed to be decided. The hardest thing is to always track what the counterpart is talking about in order to keep her/him close to the given agenda. That is one point.
But what to do when you are being approached in between? All those little,tiny, friendly „reminders“ by email that constantly keep spilling your inbox, phone calls when something was springing to your counterpart’s mind and a call was the easiest way.
As my business is project driven my contacts on the client side usually exist for a period of two up to four months. An escalation of the described problem to my manager does not seem to be helpful as it would easily jeopardize a timely project close-out.
So if you do have made good experience with certain ways to deal with those fellow men, please give me a hint of your approaches. Thx.