Reducing Inboxes in 2005: Part II - Voice Mail

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Originally published October 2005

Overview - Voice Mail

During my examination of how information comes into my life, I found that there was a much larger amount of potential “in-boxes” than I had thought. My task was to list all of these input spaces and see if the number could be reduced, and then make sure that each of them get processed.

In this post I will tackle my voice mail.

Since I am a consultant, I have voice mail at my base office and my two client offices, along with my personal cell phone and my home answering machine. Unless I am at a specific site, I don’t check voice mail. This is a big snag.

Work

So the first question is, can I reduce the number of voice mail systems in my life? Unfortunately, no, I can’t do away with them. However, since I can make sure that people know that if I am not physically at the phone, I will not check voice mail (personal choice - I am not required to answer voice mail by my clients). So my outgoing message on my base office and the client I support via email after hours was changed to instruct people that I would not be checking the voice mail and if they needed to get through to me, the main switchboard at my office can take a message and forward it. So that’s two systems off my list.

Client

My current full time client has voice mail, and I make it a point to check it morning, noon and an hour before leaving. Since I’m at my desk 95% of my time, there are few phone calls I don’t catch. However, if I am in the middle of something, I am more than willing to let phone calls go to voice mail. I check the incoming number, and if it is not from the few numbers I will always answer, or from within the company, off it goes to be dealt with later.

Cell Phone

My cell phone has voice mail, but few people call me on it. My cell phone doesn’t have a signal during the work day, and when I leave, it will beep to let me know if there are voice mail. So I take care of voice mail there once a night.

Home

Home voice mail is easy to keep up with, since I see the machine as soon as I get in the house. Those get dealt with, written down, and put into my in-box immediately for processing.

Summary

So through this exercise, even though I didn’t cut down the number of in-boxes, I did cut down on the number of in-boxes I had to process.