Video Transcript: Email & Voicemail Control & Response
Welcome back. We're moving ahead with our course developing great commission skills. We're still pursuing that skill of managing ministry time and with our video in this session, we're going to be taking a look at email and voice mail control and response. Control and response. Some of you might think that your email control is a bit out of control, but we're going to look at some ways of tightening up your practice of in a very timely and efficient way, organizing and responding to emails and voicemails. Now, some of what I'm going to share with you here is very nostalgic. Obviously, I'm an older person. I've been around for a while, and you know, I look back to how things used to be in the way of communications, and it wasn't all that long ago when the only phone was the landline and you couldn't get any further away from the phone than the actual physical cord would allow. I remember when the first cordless phones came out, and that seemed like such a great information where you could actually walk around a little bit in the house and get away from the base unit and still talk on the phone. You know, there was no laptop computer. The internet didn't exist. You know, the only mail that you received was the physical mail that the letter carrier brought to your house or to your office. You know, when you went to some kind of public gathering or a restaurant or an airport, no one's face was buried in a cell phone. And today, you know, when you're walking through the airport and you look around, it seems like almost everyone there is buried into some device, a cell phone, even a watch, sometimes an iPad, something of those sorts. Now I was, I was 40 years old when I received my first computer. It was a hand me down. It was an old 286 and it required three floppy disks that had to be loaded every single time you booted up the computer. You have to load that disk and wait for it to run through its cycle. It was given to me by a friend, a colleague with whom I worked. I was leaving ministry full time for a while to go to seminary, and he thought I needed a computer. He had just gotten his first Macintosh, and so he offered this old 286 to me, and I took him up on that and worked my way through seminary on that computer. It was a big fat, deep thing with a black screen that featured green lettering. There were no font choices of any kind. And when I printed things out, I printed them out on a dot matrix printer, again with no ability to change the size or the style of the font. But hey, I got through seminary with it, and I'm grateful for it. I was 50 years old when I received my first cell phone. Now here's a question for you. Can you imagine living for half a century before having your very own cell phone? That's just unimaginable these days now, when I first began traveling extensively as part of my training and consulting ministry, none of these technological developments had yet developed, certainly not to the point that average people like myself had access to them. So as I would travel around, I'd be on the road, sometimes for several days, sometimes for even a week or more. No one could reach me on a cell phone because they didn't exist. So in advance of a trip, I'd find out where I was going to be working, where I was going to be lodging, and I
would get landline phone numbers for those places as best that I could, and I'd leave those I'd leave those numbers with my wife in case she needed to get in touch with me while I was gone. You know, nowadays, one of my adult children
will call me on my cell phone, and of course, they're using my cell phone number, which is always the same, and they'll sometimes ask me, you know, where are you? Are you in town? See, according to my phone number, I could be right up the street. And I would say, Well, no, you know, I'm in such and such a place. And in fact, some of my children these days have an app that we're all part of called Find friends, and they can actually look at this app and see where I am anywhere in the world. It's bizarre. Well, wasn't like that. It wasn't like that previously, and I'd be spending up to 100 nights a year away from home. So I had a little system regarding phones. I would I would check into a hotel and get my room number. I'd locate the phone number of the hotel. I'd find a pay phone in a hallway and call my wife, let her know what the hotel's phone number was, what my room number was, in case she needed to get in touch with me, and in the evenings, when I had the opportunity, I would typically go to a pay phone in the hotel because it was much cheaper than dialing from the phone in the room, and I would call my wife and I would reverse the charges. That was the cheapest way for me to have a conversation with my wife while I was on the road. My, my, my, how things have changed. You know, technology has changed the communications game. How does it work today? Well, let me talk to you about a couple of advances along the way. I remember being completely fascinated by the development of the cell of the fax machine. You know, prior to the fax machine, if you had some document or contract that needed to be signed by someone who was distant from you, you had to put that document into an envelope, mail it. And unless you were willing to pay overnight charges or priority mail something of that sort, it might take two or three days for that to mail piece to arrive to them. They could sign it mail it back. So you're looking at a four to seven day turnaround at the very least, you're looking at a two day turnaround of overnight to them, overnight back. And with the fax machine, all of a sudden, you could instantaneously get signatures. It was just absolutely amazing. So you know, we we've shipped from this slow and lean communication to instant but overwhelming communication. Overwhelming how so well email and voicemail that floods in day after day after day after day, there's this avalanche of contact that comes in to us. So how do we control this avalanche of daily digital communication? Well, I'm going to suggest a couple things here. First of all, designated checks and planned response times. Designated checks and planned response times. And by the way, I want to remind you of some of the things we've talked about already. In regard to time management. We talk about time allotment, about how we distribute time throughout the span of of time that we have to work with to accomplish certain things. Now digital communications are are things that need to be dealt with on
a on a daily basis, some people would say, on an hourly basis, or even a minute to minute basis. But time allotment helps us to control. Proactive scheduling can help us to control as well as the one touch filing system that allows us to handle communications that are coming in and place them in folders that will appear in
our lives at the appropriate moment for us to deal with them. One thing that I would recommend is that you eliminate any form of. Audio or visual notification that you might have in place so that your your phone isn't dinging every time an email comes in or a text message, it's not it's not dinging when there's a phone message being left. You know, these things are interrupters, and they can happen on your computer, on your smartphones, on your iPads, on your digital watches and probably other devices as well. Eliminate notification sounds, notification vibrations, notification visuals, so that you can control when you check for email and voicemail and not be interrupted and pulled away from the things that you are trying to get done. You know, here is the tip, your devices work for you. You don't work for your devices. Don't allow your devices to be, you know, tyrannical bosses of your life. You're in control. Take control and manage the use of your devices to handle voicemail email in ways that work for you without disrupting your day. So how do you do that? Well, in terms of in terms of designated times, designated checks, you might decide something like this, there are going to be four times a day that I am going to check for email, voicemail, it might be nine in the morning, at noon, three o'clock, maybe six o'clock. Now maybe that's too much. If so fine. You know less is more in this case. So if you don't need four, maybe you do three. You do something like, say, nine o'clock, one in the afternoon and maybe five in the afternoon, something like that, whatever makes sense to you. But the point is, you're not constantly checking back. You're not wondering if you've gotten a reply from that email that you sent. You know, ahead of time, at these designated moments, I'm going to check and see what has come in in the way of emails and text messages, what has come in in the way of voicemail. And I'm not going to be undisciplined and constantly be running to my iPhone or my iPad or my computer, checking again and again and again and again and losing lots and lots of time, not to mention the distraction that every time you go on your computer, for example, if you go online, a bunch of other things pop up that buy for your attention. So you decide when you're going to check and you stick to the plan. Now, if the message that you receive when you do your designated check is something that can be responded to very quickly, then respond to them immediately, very quickly, and be done with it, you know, a one sentence response to a text message or an email, if it's short, deal with it if it's longer. However, don't fall into the trap of allowing that to pull you off schedule. Schedule a couple of times a day for email and voicemail response, you know, block them in to your daily calendar. Let's say it's 10 in the morning and two in the afternoon. So every day, at 10am you link in to your voicemail or your emails, your text messages, and if there's
something that needs to be responded to, you do so you check again, maybe at two, and you get that done. Most of the time, you're only talking about probably a 10 or 15 minute involvement. Sometimes there may be no minutes. There might not be anything to respond to, but the point is, you're not trying to keep up with every single item that comes in as it comes in. You're checking periodically, and you are responding periodically. Now, if it's a if it's not something that needs to be responded to immediately, but it is something that needs to be responded to eventually. That's the kind of item that you might print out and file in your 1 to 31s that we talked about in the last session. Now allow your schedule to. Be flexible. If you've got a situation. I've just noticed that my my PowerPoint has shifted away from the full screen, so I'm going to try to adjust that, if you'll give me just a second. There we go. Okay, I'm not sure what happened there, but we're back on track. You see, that was an interruption that I happened to notice I could deal with immediately, and I dealt with it immediately. So what you want to do is allow your your schedule to be flexible. So let's say that you normally check things at 9am for your designated check, but on a particular day, you know that you are responsible to be in a meeting at 9am so on that day, you know, and you just bump that forward to say 830 you know. You just allow your schedule to be flexible. And if you need to move one of the times of your designated checks, move it. If you need to move one of the times of your planned responses. Move it. You know you're in control. You are telling your time how to work for you. You're telling your devices how to work for you. So you're in charge. You're in control. The point is to think through your control and response to messages in advance, in advance. When you do so, you are controlling your time and you're controlling your focus throughout the day. Don't allow your incoming messages to become your master, stealing time, stealing focus away from your planned priorities. It's extremely important to get the most out of your time, and one of the ways that you can do that is by having control, having control of how you're handling your emails and your voice mails, email and voice mail control and response. Well, this wraps up our session on this particular topic, control and response of your emails and voicemails next time. We'll be continuing with our discussion of managing ministry time and our skill. Topic is going to be meetings on purpose. Meetings on purpose. In the meantime, I pray for God's blessing upon you as you seek to serve him well, and I pray that this next period of time before we come together in another video session will be very productive for you, and that you will find yourself able to be in better control of your time so that you can get more done in the name of the Lord Amen.