• WHAT: A way to customize and personalize your cellphone's voicemail to make you more productive
• WHY: Most people don't know how and suffer with the defaults that the carrier sets up
• COST: Zero

After posting earlier last week about consolidating voicemail boxes into a single voicemail box to make your life easier I got a bunch of comments - most of them lamenting how lame the voicemail systems that cellular carriers provide are. Not so, to be blunt... if you're not familiar with all of the features of your carrier's voicemail system you will most certainly be disappointed. And don't be intimidated by the big flow charts and diagrams of their system - just listen when you're calling into your voicemail and we'll help you get it all figured out. 

If you're willing to explore a bit you can tweak anyone's voicemail system so that it's easier to use, more productive for you and more enjoyable (if that's possible) for the people who call.

One of the classic complaints that I hear frequently is that the voicemail systems don't tell you the time and date of the call and, as a result, you have to ask people to leave the time of their call.  Another is that it takes so long to listen to the instructions when you call into your voicemail that it costs extra minutes just to listen to your voicemail. You can fix all of these done - and a lot more - if you just know how to speak voicemail's lingo.  And, you need to know the almost-secret access point through your voicemail system to get these things done. 

Now, as much as I'd like to supply instructions for every carrier I'm just going to cover Cingular/AT&T and Verizon Wireless here - if you subscribe to Spint, T-Mobile or a regional carrier you'll have to find their specific instructions... but they won't be much different than these.  

The "open sesame" to all these functions is in the "Administrative Options" section of the voicemail system.  On Verizon you need to enter "4" at the main menu, which then takes you to Personal Options and then "2" for Administrative Options. Cingular lets you get right to the Administrative Options directly from the main menu by entering "4" (but they call it Personal Options... wouldn't it be nice to have some standard commands across all voicemail systems so that we didn't have to go through this all the time??).  Once you're in the Administrative Options section the fun begins. 

The key is to know what to look (or in this case, listen) for in these options.  In order to address the first complaint - that of not getting the time and date on each of your messages - you can simply turn that option on in your system by pressing a button.  Listen for "Day/Time Playback" on Verizon and "Date and Time Options".  Either system will allow you to get the messages "time stamped" so that when you play them they will say, for example, "Message received on Friday, July 20 at 3:15 PM."

OK, that one was easy, right... but don't go away - this is where the real fun begins.  Do you hate having to listen to that robotic voice repeating all of the commands in gory detail?  Then change the "Prompt Level" to "Rapid."  If that's not enough information for you, you can always change it back to "Standard," or even "Extended" by going into the same menu.  

Here's my favorite... it's called "Autoplay" - all you need to do is change the Autoplay option to "On" and instead of hearing "Press 1 to listen...." when you call into your voicemail it just starts playing the messages.  I mean, why wouldn't it work this way by default?  The answer - and the answer to that question in regards to many other of these options - is that wireless companies assume that all users are beginners or idiots (or both) and default to the most basic functions and longest prompts.  There's a lot of discussion in online forums that wireless companies do this intentionally to keep you on the phone longer and burn up minutes but frankly I don't believe it - burning an extra few minutes here and there isn't nearly as economical to them as being able to put a few more people on the system and collect those monthly fees.  If you think about it, wouldn't the most profitable position for all wireless carriers to be in mean that everyone paid their monthly fees and never used their phones?

But I digress... other things that you can change include "Paging."  This is that annoying option that everyone hears and virtually nobody uses that lets someone send you a numeric message indicating they want you to call them instead of leaving a voicemail.  Does anyone actually do that anymore?  Isn't it assumed by now that if you call and someone missed your call that they'll see your name/number on the list of Missed Calls?  You can turn off the message telling people to "Press 5 to send a numeric page" within these administrative options, too.  

There are many more, but the important idea here is to get you to dive into the Personal/Administrative Options section of your voicemail menu and tinker around with it.  There's not much damage you can do and if you turn something on or off and don't know what it does you'll probably notice it the next time you retrieve your voicemail.  

Being a voicemail power user is easy - you just need to know how to say "Abracadabra" in the system's language.  In this case we simply translate "Abracadabra" into "Personal/Administrative Options."