Rant: I Loathe Voicemail, Its Disruptive and Inefficient

The clas­sic case is when I receive a voice mail that del­eg­ates me to some task. The per­son leav­ing the voice­mail will, invari­ably, then assume that I will com­plete the task UNLESS I RING THEM BACK. Now, I must inter­rupt my work­flow to listen to the voice­mail, pos­sibly ring the per­son back, or email a reply and begin the dis­cus­sion as needed.

From my per­spect­ive, this has cre­ated work for me AND the caller. The caller will need to track that I have received the mes­sage, and will action it. And, as the receiver, I will need to con­firm accept­ance and then plan to add this to my schedule.

The more I think about voice­mail, the more it seems like OLD tech­no­logy. Historically, the only way to get a mes­sage to some­body was:

• leave a mes­sage with the receptionist
• write a let­ter and post
• write a fax and send
• keep call­ing until you got through
• leave a voicemail

In recent years, we have seen all of these ‘tech­no­lo­gies’ pass away. There are very few com­pan­ies that still have recep­tion­ists, and faxes just do not get from the machine to the addresses in most com­pan­ies. The only sur­vivor today from this (dino­saur) cat­egory is voicemail.

I find the pro­cess of listen­ing, eval­u­at­ing and respond­ing to voice mail is time con­sum­ing. And since a voice­mail is, by defin­i­tion, low pri­or­ity, I will most likely respond to you by email. If your mes­sage is high pri­or­ity, you will call me back.

Since I am most likely to respond by email, I have to trans­pose the request into an email reply. That is both­er­some too, and sub­ject to inaccuracy.

Email and SMS

Now we have email and SMS and I think these are dir­ect replace­ments for these processes.

Think of SMS is a kind of short form, but very fast and ultra port­able email. You can send me a mes­sage like “Pls call me urgently”, or “Need that info by tomor­row”. I think of SMS as high pri­or­ity messages.

I only check my email infre­quently because it is non-​​realtime com­mu­nic­a­tion. Typically I check my email about four times day when I have some unstruc­tured time to read and eval­u­ate (typ­ic­ally dur­ing a cof­fee break). I sched­ule my email time and make bet­ter decisions because I con­cen­trate on ‘doing email’. I do not inter­rupt my work every time an email arrives in my inbox because it isn’t running.

I may not answer the phone

Leaving a voice­mail implies that I did not answer my phone. If I don’t answer my phone, there will be a reason, please don’t be offen­ded. I could be talk­ing to someone, or con­cen­trat­ing on some­thing. I hate tak­ing calls while in the toi­let, and will rarely inter­rupt a meet­ing just to answer the phone.

I feel it is reas­on­able for you to call me again, when it is con­veni­ent for you. This also saves you receiv­ing a call from me when you are busy.

Conclusion

If you want to con­tact me and I am not answer­ing the phone, please send me a text, or bet­ter still, send me an email. If your phone doesn’t do these things, then you should go and get one that does. It is a much more effi­cient way to communicate.

Do you think I am being unreas­on­able or odd ?

APPENDIX — Disabling Voicemail on the iPhone — O2 /​ Great Britain

If you want to switch off your voice mail dial 1760.A recor­ded mes­sage will con­firm its is disabled.

If you need it for a short time, switch­ing voice mail back — dial 1750.

If you want a miss call alert (So you receive a text to let you know that some one has tried to dial you and you didnt answer, you wernt in range, phone switched of or you was on another call then dial 1710 (Remember chan­ging to miss call alert will auto­mat­ic­ally switch voice mail off)

If you want to extend your ringing time before diver­sion to voice­mail then dial the following:

*61*901**30#

The above code will extend you ring tone to aprox 30 seconds which is the maximum.

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