The young professional who haphazardly interrupts everyone with unscheduled calls or texts is a problem. They waste people’s time, annoy, and struggle to maintain their own work schedule efficiently. They don’t yet have systems and calendars. Everything is ad hoc. It’s their default and they don’t know any other way. Emails and calendar invites are confusing and seem like noise to them.
As you mature in your career, you need systems and order. You must wrangle your days and weeks into submission. Schedules must be deliberate, chunked into maker mode and manager mode. Meetings must have prep time and be properly slotted. Your tools and rules are your friend.
Then something weird happens. You reach total overwhelm as your network and nodes and modes of contact grow. Your systems aren’t sufficient. They handle the moderately important stuff, and you mostly sorta follow your calendar, but sometimes have to ignore it. The top tier stuff just doesn’t fit, and a calendar invite doesn’t stand above the noise.
You have to bypass it all and call or text people unscheduled. You’ve got a tranche of contacts for whom the rules don’t – simply can’t – apply.
Eventually, highly successful people tend to return to their pre-professional ways and eschew systems altogether.
It seems at very low stakes, inefficient, system-less communication is fine. Medium stakes require systems in order to scale. But high stakes break the scale ceiling for these systems and it’s back to inefficient, system-less communication.