How many valuable seconds have you lost wading through your slow voicemail prompts just to delete a message you didn't really need to listen to in the first place?
Photo by maveric2003.
Reader Clinton writes in with his tricks to hack your voicemail and save yourself some precious time—since not all of us are lucky enough to have the iPhone's visual voicemail feature. His solution for saving time with his Sprint voicemail, in his own words:
Turn off numeric paging:
One of the options you can turn off is numeric paging, making it easier on the poor saps leaving you a voicemail in the first place (removes one hurdle before the beep.) In all my years of mobile phone use, I have never sent or had anyone send me a numeric page, and I don't imagine anyone ever will, really.
Turn off caller information:
Another, you can tell the system to not read you caller information, date, time, blood type, and moon phase before it relents and plays back the actual content of the message. The information is generally redundant anyway, since 95% of people who leave me a message leave me their phone number and the time in the message (and unless I'm out of range or being called by a private number, my missed call log gets it too.) They're nice enough to tell you that you can hear caller information at any time by pressing 1 during the message.
Enable Expert Mode:
The third valuable tip for Sprint voicemail users is a gem called "Expert Mode." This shortens the voice prompts prompts from something like "To delete this message, press 7" to "Delete, 7.
These tips are geared at Sprint customers (available through the Options menu of the voicemail system), but many of the same options are available with other wireless carriers.
Another time-saving trick we've used: Turn off the password requirement if you are calling from your cell phone. If you've got your own time-saving voicemail hacks, let's hear about them in the comments. Thanks, Clinton!