The Changing Way I Use the Phone

I recently downgraded my cellular plan to less minutes per month.  This is the first time I have done this since I got my first mobile phone in 1989.  I suspect I am not alone.  After all why would Verizon be playing those silly "this message has not been heard; first unheard message..." games with voicemail -- just to boost minutes.  It is only a matter of time before we get the "Telephone is Dead" stories in the press.

Amazingly, I am spending more time on my office phone.  Not only that but the time I am spending on the office phone is of higher value than ever before.  Here is a list of the moving parts impacting all of this.

The Law:  Now that it is illegal to talk on the phone in the car without hands free -- and the quality of the hands free systems still do not make the grade -- I rarely talk on the phone in my car.  I don't have a Bentley and I have never found a hands free system that cancels out road noise.

Email:  Email is that other thing that the press likes to declare dead.  Email has been with us for long enough on smartphones -- that my team get's all of the short answers they need from me by email.  I don't email while driving, but in between meetings I check my email (never voicemail), so if something needs my attention it can usually find me within an hour or two.

Conference Calls:  Most of my phone time is spent on conference calls, and a good deal of those are augmented with shared desktops.  These calls are scheduled in advance by email, and prepared for.  They are much higher value than just plain phone calls.  Even before it was against the law, attending conference calls from the car was bad form.  The background noise, lost connections, and other distractions take away from the value everyone gets from the meeting.  Unless you are sitting in your hotel room with a great signal, attending conference calls on a mobile phone should not be done.  

Voicemail:  We have a new system that delivers my voicemails to my email inbox with a .wav file attached.  I get the caller ID info, so I can tell who called.  Most of the voicemails never get listened to.  The ones from people I know usually say:  "I will send you an email about this".  

The net for me:

• Mobile data up
• Mobile voice minutes down
• Office voice minutes up
• Voicemail minutes down

Reports of the death of email...

It is hard to believe but the fax machine that runs over a telephone network has been around for about 50 years.  We still have them in our offices.  In 1996 I was president of a Rotary club in Seattle with a membership of mostly downtown professionals (architects, lawyers, CPAs...) and we distributed our weekly newsletter by fax because only 30% of our members had email addresses.  

Soon after that however, email took off and within a year or two everyone I wanted to reach by email had an address.  Spam was not really a problem yet. It was the golden age of email.  Not only that but we were the email welcoming committee because we wanted more people to do business by email -- so we all promoted it all of the time.

With email on the scene no one defended the fax machine.  The paper rolled up, you had to be there, your document was exposed to anyone that happened by... there was a lot to hate about faxes.  Of course when you needed a signature by 5 pm and it was 4:45 pm -- everybody was glad the fax machines were there.  In fact, all of the real work still came in over the fax machine.  When a fax arrived on my desk -- I paid attention.

The list of technologies that have threatened to do to email what email did to fax is long.  Most recently we have Linked In, Facebook, and Twitter.  And each time the welcoming committee moves to the newest and greatest thing and we all heap scorn on the last thing.

True there is plenty to hate about email.  All of the newsletters (most of which I somehow signed up for), the spam that my IT guys block, the rest of the spam that the junk mail filter traps, the cc's of stuff I will never read, the notifications of changes to online things, the phishing attempts and on and on.  

Twitter on the other hand is just as great as email when it was new.  There is not much spam, everyone is positive about using it, and the welcoming committee could make a Republican feel comfortable in San Francisco.  Mostly however, we all love Twitter because no one expects us to read anything there!  Glance at the stream if you want, but there is no social contract forcing you to read anything or respond.  

The email camp is pretty lonely by comparison.  No housewarming gifts and piles of useless junk and also things that people actually expect me to read and think about.  I don't think anything is even close to displacing email as the medium of real work for a very long time.