Link roundup

Some things I haven’t had time to write about from the last few weeks:

Be more productive by turning off the phone



Ringing phone from Sam Glover on Vimeo.

Annoying, isn’t it? And yet, if you are an attorney, there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of people who can make your phone ring any time they want to.

This is my favorite part of my answering machine message:

I return phone calls at 10 and 4 if I am in the office. If you need to reach me more quickly, please send me an e-mail.

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I hate voicemail

Voicemail is dead. Please tell everyone so they’ll stop using it.

Oh, if only it were so! Voicemails are one of the most annoying time sucks in my work day.

I hate the phone. It is always an interruption. But if I don’t answer it, then there is that blinking voicemail notification staring me in the face, reminding me that I will have to listen long, rambling messages.

I would much rather quickly scan an e-mail when I have a few free moments and mental cycles, but nobody seems to listen to the part of my message that politely requests an e-mail instead of a voicemail.

I would love to just stop using voicemail entirely, but ours is not a profession where that would fly. Instead, I am thinking about using an assistant—or maybe a service like SpinVox or PhoneTag, that converts voicemail messages to text and sends them as e-mail.

A world without voicemail. Beautiful.

I decided to give PhoneTag a try for my trip to visit mynsister in Alaska (hello from Juno!), and I am loving it.