Hi, you have reached the desk of Brick Andrews. I am currently checking and responding to voicemail at noon and 4:00 pm. If you require assistance with a truly urgent matter, please contact me on my cell phone at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Otherwise, please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can. You can also leave your email address as I am often able to respond faster that way.  Thanks and have a great day.

Source: Inspired by the 4-Hour Workweek.

You will notice that it is a slightly more compact version than the sample given in the book - it turns out the amount of recording time on my voicemail service is quite limited. By the way, having a script seems to be a best practice when recording messages, otherwise you are forever pausing in the wrong spots, saying “um” a lot, or just generally screwing up the message you are trying to record. I had a script and it still took me three takes to get it right!

Seriously, changing the voicemail recording was rather simple. The hard part is not automatically answering the phone when it rings. For some reason, most humans are hard wired to drop everything and pick up the phone when it rings, often with the urgency of an emergency response team. It is an unconscious reaction and quite Pavlovian. It was actually quite refreshing today to not pick up the phone when it was ringing and batch the handling of calls into a single period at noon.  Since it was my first day on this, I have been quite militant in not answering the phone. I suppose if you were really doing nothing you might enjoy taking a call - all things in moderation.

In general, we should take and make telephone calls when it is convenient for us, not necessarily the caller. The same holds true for home as well as the office. I have a voicemail service on my home line, and I recommend you get one too. Why should I answer the phone if I am in the middle of watching a movie, or playing a game with my kids???

ShareThis