From the course: Time Management Tips

Set voicemail and email expectations

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Set voicemail and email expectations

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- If I call your voicemail, what will I hear? Most people have a voicemail message something like this: Hi, you've reached the voicemail of Dave, leave a message, I'll get back to you as soon as possible. What does "as soon as possible" mean? It means whatever the person who's leaving the message wants it to mean. It could be now, it could be in the next five minutes. Well, what we want to do is transition out of the culture of "now" to the culture of "when". Most people have an expectation of now. If you don't respond to that voicemail in the next five minutes, they send you an email. And if you don't respond to that email, they send you a text message, and on and on, which creates a lot of switches and interruptions in your day. What we want to do is move to the culture of "when", which establishes an expectation in the other person's mind that is reasonable. How do we do that? Well, let's consider it both with voicemail and with email. First voicemail, how often should you check your voicemail for the kind of business that you're in, or the kind of thing that you do each day? And also, how often is reasonable for you to check it? How often can you check that voicemail? Establish a schedule in your calendar that you know you can stick with. Let's take for example the idea that I'm going to check my voicemail twice per day. I'm going to check it at noon, and I'm going to check it at the end of the day at four. I would then create a voicemail expectation that says something like this: Hi, you've reached the voicemail of Dave Crenshaw. Leave a message, and I'll respond at either noon or a 4:00 pm, and if you call me after 5:00, I'll return your call the next day. I've now moved out of the culture of now and established an expectation of when. Now email is a little bit trickier. You don't want to have an auto-responder that responds to every single email that lets people know when they can expect a reply. That's not reasonable, and will create more interruptions. So first, you want to get together with the people that you work with every day and have a conversation. What is the culture that we're going to establish at this organization, this company? How often should we expect each other to respond to those emails? And I recommend that you create a written guideline of what other people can expect. Really, we start by establishing a personal understanding that we can't respond to every email immediately, but we can respond perhaps within one business day, or four business hours. Now what if you go on an extended vacation or an extended trip? In this situation, you do want to set up an auto-responder that establishes an expectation. For instance, right now I'm filming this course for Lynda and I have an auto-responder that says I'll be gone for these few days, and people should, in most cases, expect a response at the end of those days. By establishing an expectation, we regain control. We can move from a culture of "now" to a culture of "when". And when you operated from a culture of "when", you'll have many less interruptions, and you'll be far more productive.

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