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.