From Rick Tehrani, president and publisher of TMCNet, comes this gem about the productivity-enhancing potential of visual voicemail:
. . . the ability to be talking with a caller and receive voicemail messages as text while still talking is an amazing productivity booster. A busy executive can be on the phone while forwarding voicemail messages as action items via e-mail. Others in an organization can respond to these voicemails while the executive continues speaking.
Now, don't get me wrong: I think that, like many new technologies, there's a time and place for visual voicemail. Hell, if nothing else, not squandering the salad days of your life listening to the dreaded,
For more message options, press 0. To continue wasting minutes on your calling plan, press 6. To be put on hold indefinitely, press *8
is worth the price of visual voice mail alone.
But I'm pretty sure that talking with someone and reading voice mail is not an "amazing productivity booster." This is just another opportunity to fall victim to the siren call of multi-tasking. And it doesn't work. Period.
Dan,
I’ve been using GotVoice for a few months now (mentioned it here (http://www.setconsulting.com/newsletters/set2008_01.php), and one of the real benefits I’ve come across is how easy it is to work from anywhere–I have my cellphone and main office extensions transcribed and emailed to me…so I never have to check voicemail. Additionally, since most of my team works remotely they often forget to call in and check voicemail. By sending all their voicemail to email (transcribed, too), it really does help to keep all their incoming items in one place that they check regularly.
The transcription isn’t perfect but the audio attachment is really helpful…plus you have a record of the call should you ever need to refer back to the details of the message.
Just wanted to reaffirm to your readers how helpful this is, especially when you use it to minimize your inputs (not just to enable multitasking)
Incredible, Dan. Good find. Maybe there’s a conflict of interest here? Or perhaps most folks just don’t understand the extremely high impact of multitasking on our productivity…