Do You Answer Your Phone?

It’s a simple question, do you answer your phone, or do you let it ring through to voicemail?  For that matter, do you leave voicemails or just send emails or texts?

When you’re running the oDesk client you usually don’t want to be interrupted.  It can be annoying to suspend and restart the client half a dozen times an hour because you keep getting interrupted.  Since six-year-olds don’t always leave Daddy alone even when they know they’re supposed to be asking their sister for anything they want, the temptation to ignore the phone when it rings is just that much stronger.

You might want to think twice before you do that, or at least check the caller ID.

Voicemail has become the twenty-first century’s black hole of information.  More and more people simply don’t listen to it, and many of us are probably the same way.  I dislike voicemail so much that I refused to set it up on my cell phone.  The missed calls list gives me all the information I really need:  I can see who called and call them back without having to wade through the prompts of a voicemail system.

I’m not alone, either.

More and more people are avoiding voicemail whenever possible because retrieving messages takes that much more time than simply calling back, and you’ll probably have to call back after listening to the voicemail anyway.

However, the last thing any freelancer wants is to miss an important message from a client.  It’s not going to do you any good if you do a full week’s work you weren’t supposed to do because you didn’t listen to your voicemail.  Sure if it’s on oDesk you’re likely to be paid, but it may cost you a lot more in the long run in work you don’t get in future.

So if any of your clients do have your phone number, you’d be better off answering the phone than letting it go to a voicemail you may not remember to check.

Also, when you have to contact your client, it’s best to use email or text messages, rather than phone if at all possible.  First it will give you a permanent record of what was said, but it is probably going to be easier for them too.  Few things are quite as annoying as having to listen to a voicemail a dozen times to make sure you wrote the phone number down correctly.

Phones, especially cell phones, are incredibly useful devices and very few of us could live without them.  As I write this I have my cell phone on the desk waiting for my girlfriend’s son to call me for a ride home from the movies.  Having cell phones means I could come home and work while he was in the movie without having to worry about watching the clock.

The important thing to remember is that you can’t rely on voicemail, and if your clients do you had better be prepared to listen to it and act on it.  If you aren’t going to check your voicemail each time you see a missed call you are going to be a lot better off either not handing out your number or just turning the voicemail off completeley.

It’s like any tool:  use it properly or don’t use it at all.