All the smart phones, tablets, sub-notebooks and the likes have made good old voice-mail obsolete.
It feels like a lifetime ago, but when I started working one of my favorite productivity tools was voice mail. I distinctively remember driving to work and calling my office voice mail from my mobile phone, and listening to long, convoluted messages from colleagues, managers and sometime clients too.
I could listen, re-listen, forward as-is or add my comments and share with others. And of course, archive or just delete.
It worked for me.
By the time I got to the office, I was fully briefed on key areas of my job and ready to get the day started. In many cases, I had even formed a crude follow up plan, if needed, and flagged key action items (on me or others). Believe it or not, email was only a supporting play, and almost none of my voice mail messages were backed up by a related email.
Granted, the quality of the voice message wasn’t always that good: sometimes you could not really understand much of what was said. Nevertheless, in most cases it was quite informative and valuable.
As always, there were those who would master the voice mail thing – clear, concise, short and to-the-point messages – others less so, rambling on forever. The system we used at my company did not put time restrictions to voice mail, so that was perfect for the long talkers!
The beauty of voice mail was that you could listen to it whilst doing something else: driving your car to work, shuffling papers on your desk or washing the dog. It was facilitating multi-tasking without really forcing you to juggle different medias. A little bit like listening to the radio whilst vacuuming the carpet in your living room!
You could easily store your messages on the PBX or, with a little creativity, download and store them on your laptop for future reference. You could send them to one person or to a group. You could build voice-distribution-lists.
It was handy.
Best of all, the intrinsic limitations of voice mail as a tool made it so effective. No bulky attachments of a hundred slides, for example. No endless lists of URL’s and portals to click on to find more info. And best of all, no hundreds of emails in your inbox to go through.
Voice mail was also very personal. If the originator was angry, you could tell. If she was happy, you could too. The best ones were able to instigate action by their passionate voices (but I’m afraid that others could bore you to death too!).
I believe that the most natural way for humans to interact and to communicate is not the web. It’s not email. It’s not instant messaging. It’s not mobile text messaging either. And no, it’s definitely not Facebook.
The best way is to talk to each other. It doesn’t really matter if in real-time or – as with voice mail – in deferred time.
The one modern tool I find very close to the old voice mail system is Twitter. Again, the design limitation of 140 chars is the key aspect making Twitter so functional. You cannot really pass on emotions as well as with voice, but you can get close if you are a little creative.
Voice mail was also accessible from anywhere, as long as you had a phone line (street pay-phones anybody?). You did not need to lug around smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc. All you needed was a quarter $, so to speak, and you were in business. Pretty low tech huh?
That’s my point. All the hi-tech devices and tools that we are taking for granted today, are they really making us so more productive than say fifteen years ago? Or are they just over-burdening us (figuratively as well as conceptually), creating layers of complexity and ultimately of intricacy in the way we relate to and work with each others?
Have we lost the ingenuity and simplicity of using limited tools “because they work best for what we need to specifically achieve” and fell victims of “because it can be done”?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to be 7×24 reachable and available. All I need is to work with people through simple, honest and fulfilling interactions. That’s how I grow.
Have your say here.
