On hold calls.
Aren’t they infuriating?
You call to fix one small thing, perhaps a bill, a delivery, a password… and suddenly you’re trapped in a tinny musical purgatory. The same eight bars looped over and over. Interrupted every 45 seconds by a syrupy voice assuring you that your call is important to us.
Important enough to soundtrack your slow descent into madness, apparently.
The music is almost impressive in its ability to aggravate. Too upbeat to ignore. Too distorted to enjoy. Is it accidental? Is it psychological warfare? Rage baiting to the max, if you ask me.
But here’s the real reason it winds us up:
It steals our life!
Twenty minutes here. Thirty there. Sometimes an hour. Just… gone. And what do we do while it vanishes? We freeze.
We perch.
We stare at the phone like it might sprint off the table if we look away.
We become unusually obedient citizens of the Queue.
Why?
Because we’re afraid. Afraid we’ll miss the click. Afraid we won’t hear the human voice arrive. Afraid we’ll lose our place and have to start the whole symphony again.
So we wait. Dutifully. Entirely paused.
But what if “on hold” didn’t mean “on pause”?
If you spend just 20 minutes a day on hold (and many of us spend far more), that’s over two hours a week. Nearly nine hours a month. A whole working day reclaimed if you stop treating it like dead time.
The trick is simple: prepare for the hold.
The moment you dial, assume you’ll be waiting. Put the phone on speaker. Turn the volume up enough to hear the switch from music to human. Then… carry on with your life.
You can:
- Keep working.
- Do the online shopping.
- Respond to emails.
- Write that letter you’ve been meaning to send.
- Plan next week’s meals.
- Load the washing machine.
- Tidy a drawer.
- Paint your nails.
- Chop vegetables.
- Even do a quick stretch or tidy around the house.
Suddenly, the hold music becomes background noise instead of a full-body hostage situation.
If the music truly tests your sanity, lower the volume and rely on the sharper change in sound when someone picks up. Most systems have a distinct “click” or silence before a real voice appears. You’ll learn the pattern quickly.
You can even keep a small “Hold List” – tiny, low-brain tasks you can dip into instantly. Nothing deep. Nothing that requires flow. Just useful, nibble-sized jobs that normally get postponed because they’re too small to schedule but too big to ignore.
The shift is psychological as much as practical.
You are not waiting.
You are multitasking with mild irritation.
And that’s a powerful difference.
We can’t create more hours in a day. But we can reclaim the scraps that quietly slip through the cracks. On hold time is one of the sneakiest thieves around — but it’s also one of the easiest to outsmart.
So next time you hear that jaunty instrumental loop begin, don’t freeze.
Press speaker.
Stand up.
And take your minutes back.