Email efficiency for lawyers may just boil down to using it less — which is not a crazy idea, by the way.
Cal Newport has solid recommendations about curtailing its use in his excellent book “A World Without Email.”
Recently, however, I realized there’s a gap in his advice.
Before I get to the gap, let me say Newport is…
Right About One Thing
Email is a solution for asynchronous communication. And there are other better ways to do what we tend to use email for.
Unfortunately, Newport fails to offer the best solution for asynchronous communication. He acknowledges we often need to do back-and-forth conversations.
But he’s not ruthless enough about leveraging asynchronicity.
Asynchronous = Frictionless Freedom
So what are other ways to replace email? Newport recommends:
- Slack or Teams
- Trello or other Kanban-style tools
- Weekly “office hours”
I’m sorry: this advice is misguided. Slack and Teams have too much friction.
The same goes for Trello.
And office hours? No, definitely not.
What’s The Better Way?
We need to use voice-driven asynchronicity.
Meaning…
You blabber into your phone, and a voice message goes to the recipient. This is just like an email but without having to type text.
You’re just sending a voice message.
I found the ideal tool for this, which, perhaps, Cal Newport doesn’t know about.
Voxer is the ideal tool
Voxer is the perfect tool for using your voice to send messages back and forth with anyone with a smartphone.
Its Special Benefits
- Voxer is the only tool that allows you to send both audio and text messages
- It allows group messaging, which works well
- Voxer has good encryption, which is important
- It allows you to broadcast to up to 1,000 people who cannot respond (good for alerts that don’t require a conversation)
- Voxer is robust (e.g., it will continuously try to send and receive messages when it has the signal —which other tools like iMessage don’t).
- With Voxer, you’ll never have to manually resend a message that failed to deliver because you were offline when you recorded the message.
- You can download all your messages and listen to them offline, and respond if you’re offline and know they’ll be sent when your phone is connected again to the internet
What Voxer Costs
You can start using Voxer for free and maybe never have to pay if you don’t want the advanced features.
The Pro plan is just $3.99/month, but you won’t need that until you really start using Voxer. And even then, you might not need the Pro plan.
Use it to Understand It
The barrier to insight is not using the app. Once you start using it, you’ll inevitably have an “ah ha” moment where you realize that Voxer is the key to frictionless communications.
Who do you want to use it with? How about:
- Team members or colleagues
- Clients
- Family members
- Anyone who’s already using it
In short, it’s a powerful tool that you at least need to check out and try with someone who is on Voxer (more about that in a moment)
Listen to Ari Meisel
Productivity guru Ari Meisel swears by Voxer (that’s how I learned about it). Check out his podcast episode, where he explains why it’s so powerful and useful.
Among the things you’ll learn:
- Voxer is how Meisel does 99% of his communications with colleagues, clients, friends, and family.
- He doesn’t have to think about what time zone people are in or their schedule.
- He no longer has scheduled calls on his calendar because it’s unnecessary.
Voxer is an 80/20 Lever
If ever there was an 80/20 opportunity for getting a lot more done with less hassle, Voxer is it.
I hope you try it out, and if you do, report back to let me know how it goes.
And if you want to practice with someone on Voxer, you can try it with me. Just send a message to me via Voxer (my username is ‘ernieattorney’ — or search for “Ernest Svenson” and you’ll find me).
I’d seriously love to hear from you.
