Organizing and Controlling Voicemails
by Suzanne Babb

Description: Helpful, practical tips for organizing and tracking phone calls you need to return.

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The System

You have a cell phone, a house phone, and an office phone and you receive voicemails on all 3 of them. Plus you are expected to return all of those voicemails at the speed in which the person who left it expects you to. Talk about insanity! We haven't even touched on what you are currently using to jot down voicemail messages on...Post It's, scrap pieces of paper, the back side of a report, random piece of paper.

What do you say we streamline this process a bit, get all of those homeless messages a place to stay, and your sanity back in check? The way our system works is we tell you the tools you will need, how you will use them and then the reason behind our organizational madness. Feel free to tweak the system now and again until you find the right groove that fits your voicemail needs, but the basic foundation has been laid out for you. All you need to do is, Organize!

The Items You Need

• Composition Book
• Highlighter with Flags
• Binder Clip
• Really Nifty Pen (optional)

Getting Started

1. Every time you receive a voicemail, label the page in your composition book with the date and a V (for Voicemail). If you are feeling frisky, go ahead and take it one step further and put a VC for cell phone, VW for work, and VH for home.

2. Follow it up with the person's name and phone number.

3. Jot down the pertinent details of the call.

4. As you go through and return phone calls, mark them off with a highlighter.

5. It doesn't matter if it's a nice line or a diagonal line through the whole message, just as long as it's visually shown that it is complete.

6. At the end of the day, check through your notebook and make sure you have marked off or called back all of your messages.

7. Mark the messages that you were not able to get to with a Post-It flag. You will now visually be able to tell which calls you need to make first thing the following morning.

8. As your composition book starts to fill up, use a binder clip to clip together all of the previous voicemails so you can easily get to the next available space. This will help keep your voicemails in chronological order, eliminating the confusion of random placement.

System Success

You now have the HOW to managing your voicemails, but now let's get to the WHY of the system and how you are going to turn this into an organizational success.

Composition Book: You don’t necessarily need to use a composition book; you can use any type of notebook you feel comfortable with. I personally like the composition books, because they come in great colors, it's portable, I can flip it to the side, and I do not have a tendency to use it for anything other than VOICEMAILS; which is KEY to making this system a success. You should not keep "notes", action items, grocery lists, and please abstain from playing tic-tac-toe with the kids in your Voicemail Log. If you start corrupting it with other information, it becomes useless.

Highlighter with Flags: We have all seen them; we have all "wanted" one, but couldn't really determine why we needed it. Well, now you have a reason! The nifty highlighters with a flag in the barrel are perfect for voicemails! You need to have them both, you need to have them at the same time, and you certainly don't need to have more tools than necessary.

The highlighter portion of the system is an important part of the process in that if you used a pen, a marker, or any other bold marking pen there is a very real possibility that you will lose an integral piece of a voicemail message. With a highlighter you can visually see you have accomplished the task, without losing the information itself.

The flags are nice to help identify those pieces that need to be boldly identified without being obnoxious or subdued. You will automatically notice any red, orange or yellow flags staring you in the face as you see your voicemail notebook. They won't go unnoticed and it won't be an eye sore.

Binder Clip: Your notebook will quickly fill up with voicemails and you will not want to be wasting your time flipping through the book to find an empty page. It is imperative that you never turn to just any open page in the notebook and start scribbling voicemail messages. This will not only result in losing the integrity of the chronological order of the messages, it also looks sloppy, and you will end up wasting valuable time.

By using a binder clip to keep the pages of past voicemails together you won't need to worry about the messages. These messages have all been called back, they aren't getting in the way of progress, and they are still there if you need to refer back to them to get a phone number or verify information.

Organizationally Empowered

The wonderful part of organizing, even a small portion of your daily routine, is in knowing that YOU DID IT! I may have showed you where to start, how to get there, and given you a few helpful tips along the way, but in the end you have done this yourself. Just like any habit that you want to break or create, it takes repetition, consistency, and dedication. If you can do this for 10 business days, you will be on the fast track to a life without chaos!

Happy Organizing!

Reprinted with permission.

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