Checking Voicemail: The Newest Casualty Of Technology

When was the last time you checked your voicemail? I check my work messages often since leaving and checking voicemail is still the norm in daily business (along with antiquated email), but I admit, I have personal voicemails that have been sitting there for a month or two waiting for me. When I think about checking them, the first thing that goes through my mind is, “I have to set aside some time for that” because checking voicemail is an inefficient time sink.

I’ve talked about this so many times to friends and family and they often look at me like I’m nuts. I have one friend who said, “Are you really that impatient that you can’t even take the time to listen to a voicemail?” To me, it’s not about impatience. It’s about efficiency and optimization. Checking voicemail just doesn’t make the cut when there are so many other, better ways to communicate.

So, I was very excited to see this exact topic was hot this week, prompted by an article on USA Today called Voicemail In Decline With Rise Of Text, Loss Of Patience. USA Today came to this conclusion after reviewing voicemail data provided by Vonage, a popular VoIP in the States. According to Vonage, we “hate the whole voicemail introduction, prompts and having to listen to them in chronological order.”

As you know, on the iPhone, we don’t have to listen to them in chronological order, but it doesn’t matter, I still don’t do it. I even have friends who when they call me, if I don’t answer, they’ll just hang up. As one of them explained, “a missed call by someone is the new voicemail.” There are even several apps now that will transcribe voicemails into texts and send them to you (they aren’t perfect, but you’ll get the gist of what the voicmail says). I think we’ve all learned to fit social media into our lives so well, but voicemail is like the big pink elephant in the room. It just doesn’t fit nicely with the rest. To me, it’s a complete interruption of my workflow during the day. What’s your opinion about it?

Checking Voicemail Is A Time-Consuming Chore

Via: [Byte] Image Credit: [QuentinUK / Flickr]