Add 76 Days To Your Life – Here’s How…

by Ryan on February 5, 2010

Get Rid of Voicemail

Saving 5 minutes a day by eliminating a meaningless routine task will add 76 days of free time to your life. 76 days to do whatever you choose. 76 days = 1,824 hours. I just added 76 days of free time to my life. Here’s how you can do it to…

ELIMINATE VOICE MAIL, which on average, wastes around 5 minutes per day, every day. I have not checked my voicemail in over a month now and I feel oh so free. It’s amazing and I encourage you to try it too. Voice mail is a total waste of time. You have to call your own number, enter a PIN number (in the case of Verizon) and then listen to someone else’s voice recording and then react to it.  Wouldn’t it be easier if your voice mails were just emailed to you?  Or perhaps texted to you?  Or both?  Well then can be, and for FREE.

Here’s how you can eliminate voice mail from your life forever…

Step 1: Sign up for Ribbit.com. It’s FREE.  If they are not accepting new users at the moment, ask me for an invite code. I’ll gladly share one with you (I have at least 3 more that I can share).  If you prefer a paid service, you can check out YouMail or PhoneTag (2 LA based companies).  YouMail and PhoneTag both run around $5 per month I believe.

Step 2:  Let Ribbit hijack your existing voice mail.  All you have to do is enter a long funky number into your phone, Ribbit will then call you and take over your voicemail, send you a PIN to enter on the site to confirm, and your voicemail is now officially linked to Ribbit.  You can remove it anytime and go back to old school voice mail by just logging into your Ribbit.com account and deactivating the service.

Step 3:  (Optional) Upload your contacts to Ribbit.com so the transcriptions will show the name of the contact (not just their phone number) when they are sent to you.

Step 4.  Set up a custom voice greeting.

Step 5:  Tell Ribbit to both email and text all new voice transcriptions to you when new voice mails arrive.  If you want to actually listen to the message, Ribbit gives you a specific phone number to call within each message (just click the number and most smartphones will automatically dial) and you can actually listen if you choose to.

If you follow steps 1 to 5, you will have eliminated the useless act of checking voice mail forever and saved 76 days of your life (5 minutes per day for an entire lifetime).  If you need a sign up invite for Ribbit, let me know and I’ll be sure to invite you and move you one step further to a more fully automated life.

UPDATE: Last week I experienced my first Ribbit faux pas where one voice mail message was not emailed / texted to me (my phone was off at the time but the message never did come in).  The message was saved out the Ribbit.com site but it was not emailed / texted to me.  I guess that’s what I get for using a free service.