subject: Google Voice As A Time Management Tool For Small Business Owners [print this page] Google Voice As A Time Management Tool For Small Business Owners
Google Voice is a great time management tool for small business owners and entrepreneurs. It allows you to not answer your telephone when you're not expecting calls, so you can continue to work uninterrupted. It's a great little tool so that you can send all of your telephone lines to one phone number and actually collect voice mails and get them transcribed for you. And they'll actually send them to you via text message or email.
It's a free service, but you have to be invited, so it's kind of in beta testing yet. So if you need an invite, you'll have to get one from somebody that you know that has a Google Voice account.
But once you get one, it's a great little tool. You can actually send text messages from it and you can organize telephone calls in different categories so you can prearrange and put them in groups. You can also put in SPAM phone numbers, so if there's people calling you that you don't want, you can actually mark them as SPAM so you don't get those any longer.
Heres why I really like it. Most people know I don't take incoming telephone calls from people who are not already clients of mine or members, and I dont take any calls that are unscheduled. So what it allows me to do is have my office telephone line answered all the time, and it allows me to get transcriptions and get those in an email format.
And in many cases I'm actually able to answer the questions that people have without actually having to get on the phone and spend a half an hour with somebody on the telephone. So it really allows me to continue to work in my office, have telephone calls come in, but not have to answer each and every one of them and get distracted, so I can continue to get a lot of work done.
One of the biggest reasons most people don't get anything done is they're always getting interrupted and not getting any work done. So Google Voice allows you to work on your business instead of being interrupted all the time, and it allows you to answer messages on your terms, not somebody else's. And the transcription service is great, because you can actually just read the message, and actually reply to them via email if you'd like. And if you want, you can pick up the phone and call them.
But it allows you to actually send them an email back, answer the question they may have without having to get on the phone. You know how some people are, once you get them on, you can't get them off. So without wasting a whole bunch of time, it's a great little tool to use, so I'd check into it.
Now if you're not able to get in with Google, I believe there's a service called Onebox, and you can go ahead and use their service. It works very similar, from what I hear, but I'm a big fan of the Google Voice so far.
Now I have to warn you, the transcription level is not great yet. They're working on it. But it's there and you can get the gist. If not, they also send you the audio file so you can listen to the full message and then reply. So check into it, but it's another one of the tools that I use to get a lot of work done without getting bothered, and I would really recommend that you go look into it.
by: Darin Spindler
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