Mark Suster on Productivity

Great post on how to become productive. The first one is "eliminate voicemail". I couldn't agree more. It's one of the most inefficient and cumbersome ways to convey information. I can go through an email with the same content about 50 times faster than voicemail. Somewhat of a correlarly, if someone sends me a link to what I think is an article on a topic I am interested in, and the damn thing turns into a video? What a bloody waste of time. More on Mark's awesome blog here:

1. Eliminate Voicemail – I’ve read many articles on productivity over the years and most will tell you to severely limit the amount of inbound phone calls you receive. Tim Ferriss gave this extra emphasis in his book. Like you, I struggle to return everybody’s emails because I get too many. When added to my volume of Facebook messages, LinkedIn requests, blog comments and Tweets my head is definitely below water. So I often try to stay off of email during the day. I scan it for the most important messages to be sure nothing urgent has popped up.

Colin Kelley, the CTO of RingRevenue, left a comment in my last post about the need to “mask interrupts” in order to get work done. It made me laugh because the technical world has this exact phrase to talk in computing sense about the need to block out interruptions in order to complete a task.

“Sikakkar” (sorry, don’t know first name) left a comment to the post that he or she believes that it is important to be on email throughout the day to help with consensus building for his or her team and that the productivity drain of email is outweighed by the fact that the team feels involved in and bought into the decisions that are reached by a group.

I believe in consensus building and understand Sikakkar’s sentiment. At Accenture one of the most valuable tools they used when we were young programmers were “point sheets.” They taught us to write down questions when they came up and batch them together in point sheets. The logic was 1) you don’t ruin the productivity of your supervisor or teammates and 2) questions have a way of sorting themselves out when you wait. I personally believe that in the interconnected, “always on” world that is 2010 people emphasize communicating too frequently versus respecting the productivity of others. Admittedly I also fall into this trap.

Regarding phone calls, if I answered every phone call I’d be completely dead. Why? First, when somebody is calling you by definition they’re interrupting something that you’re working on. It’s much easier to be productive if you have long spurts of time to focus on a task and the phone call breaks the cycle. Of course if I’m not ensconced in deep, thoughtful work then by all means I answer the call.

It might sound rude to not answer calls when they come in but I find it acceptable as long as you return phone calls (which admittedly I’m still not at 100% despite best efforts). As Tim Ferriss would say, (me paraphrasing from memory) “why should a caller assume that when they want to speak to you is the optimal time for the recipient of the call to speak with you?”

But if you’re not answering every call when it comes in you run the risk of having to listen to large volumes of voicemail. I found this a killer so I hacked it. Quite literally. I got rid of voicemail.

About six months ago I signed up for a service called PhoneTag run by Jamie Siminoff. They take all incoming calls on my mobile phone and work phone, transcribe them for me and send me an email with a text transcription and a .WAV file to listen to messages if I feel the need to. The service starts at just $9.95 / month (no, I’m not an investor, I just love the product. In fact, they were recently bought by a publicly traded company called Ditech Networks).

OK, before you all tell me about Google Voice, let me say the following. If you care about the quality of your message transcriptions then it is worth the $10 / month to pay for the service. PhoneTag uses a combination of technology and human translation and thus has a much better accuracy rate. If you care about a free product then you should obviously use Google Voice.

Messages with any transcription service aren’t 100% accurate, but in 19/20 messages I can understand the vast majority of the context and don’t need to listen to the .WAV file. In the 1/20 case (5%) I just click on the message and hear it the same as I would if I were listening to voicemail.

Two big advantages for me. 1) I can read what you’re saying one hell of a lot faster than I can listen to voicemails and 2) whenever people hear that their message is being transcribed (it says this on the message) then they tend to leave shorter voicemails. Nice unintended consequence. Anyway, six months in and I’m LOVING it. Huge time saver for me.