“Your Voicemail Isn’t Working”

Also known as: The joy of unresponsiveness.

At the time I’m writing this, it’s been more than seven years since I’ve had a voicemail option on my phone. This is a wonderful way of living.

It started by mistake: I changed carriers and forgot to set up the mailbox. Some carriers have a default option, where callers are automatically directed to a generic mailbox. But this new carrier I’d switched to had no such option. 

For the first few days after the switch, I kept thinking, I need to set that up. Then the days turned into weeks. A few people who called would mention it to me later: “Hey, did you know you don’t have voicemail on your phone?”

Yep, I knew. And after a month I’d decided that it was blissful. 

In the years since, I’ve often heard from people—though rarely people I want to hear from, funny enough—who send me messages through other channels to “let me know” that they were unable to leave me a voicemail. 

Sometimes the person sounds alarmed. Troubled, even. Worried on my behalf. 

Their tone: Did you know your voicemail is turned off?? 

As if I will respond: Ohmygosh that’s terrible let me fix it right away.

It’s kind of like asking, “Did you know you weren’t conforming to the general expectations of society, that is, being responsible and returning every call regardless of how you feel about it?” 

Reader Challenge: Put a Brick in Your Mailbox 

Voicemail itself isn’t the only modern practice that can become optional. Chances are, there are many other mailboxes in your life that you could close off. 

Consider this: How many different means of contact do you currently have?

When most people think about this question for a while, the answer is usually six or more. Sometimes it’s a dozen! 

Most likely you have a phone number and email address (and maybe more than one of each). But almost every social network includes a messaging feature, so that’s another inbox.

You might have a shared platform for work communication (Slack, Teams, Notion, others). You might have WhatsApp, Snapchat, Marco Polo, iMessage, or any other number of services.

For any of these, what would happen if you closed off the inbox feature, or at least put people on notice that you won’t be able to reply to every message?

You could do this a couple of different ways. For example, some people I know use a permanent autoresponder for their email that says they probably won’t be able to respond, even if they’re actually reading most messages. They create the expectation that the person contacting them likely won’t hear back—and then they have the option to respond or not as they see fit. 

If this tactic isn’t feasible for you, a simpler option would be to close direct messages on a few of those social networks, unless you really enjoy them and don’t think of them as burdensome. 

In Unhelpful Life Advice, I mentioned that I wouldn’t tell you to “just focus,” because we live in a world of distractions. But the more of those distractions we can manually remove, the better. 

Not every message needs to be returned right away, or at all.

In fact, you can also extend this philosophy well beyond inboxes. Meetings can be skipped. Requests for surveys from consumer brands you patronize can be ignored. Laundry doesn’t need to be folded.¹

In addition, many problems can wait. And even better: sometimes, when you wait, the problems just go away!

But Isn’t This Rude? (Not At All!)

First of all, before I inadvertently discovered that voicemail was optional, I was terrible about returning calls. Consider which is worse—allowing people to leave messages that I’ll never listen or respond to, or simply not giving callers the option? 

I like to think of it as setting reasonable expectations.

We will continue to return to this theme throughout the year: you must take care of yourself first. You will have more capacity to care for others—return all the calls you want, fold laundry, whatever—if you have first taken steps to look after yourself.

Learning to define and enforce boundaries is a skill, and one worth practicing. The better you get at it, the more time and space you free up.

Lesson learned: voicemail, like many other conveniences that become burdens, is totally optional. Keep it on if you like it. Turn it off if you don’t. 

What change can you make to “turn off” something unnecessary in your life?

Shoutouts

• Ozan Varol, a real-life rocket scientist, writes a newsletter that I look forward to each week. He’s also the author of Awaken Your Genius.

Conversation Starters

1. When leaving voicemail for someone else, do you practice in advance what you’ll say?

2. What communication method is most distressing to you: email, phone calls, social media, or something else?

3. Can you put a brick in at least one of your mailboxes? 

4. “We’re all going on a picnic, and I’m bringing…”

1. At some point we’ll talk about the wonderful book How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis. She offers lots of practical, contrarian tips for busy people.