Please Do Not Leave a Message: Why Millennials Hate Voice Mail

Honestly, I'm doing this, and I'm a Gen-Xer.

Have been moving that way for a while, with the notification that voice mails do not get priority response.

It's only a tiny step from that to, "just don't do it."

People can call in, hear the greeting, which tells them how to send a text via e-mail, which I will see and respond quickly to, send ordinary e-mail, or contact me via various message systems.

All of these work better than voice mail does for nearly everything.

I've already abandoned having a desk phone. Technically, one is there, but I make sure the number isn't known. I don't even know it.

My own move away from VM happened in the late 00's As cell phones were becoming solidified as the norm and I noticed younger people basically avoiding that kind of interaction, I shifted to where the action was, and that's text, Internet Messages, e-mail.

All of those can result in a voice call, and that's fine. Once it's needed, no worries. Same goes for web screen sharing and teleconferences of various kinds. A ton of stuff can get done quick with those.

Exchanging voice mails is probably the worst, save for ordinary mail.

"The fact that we have four generations in the workplace, and they're going to be there for some time, the younger generations — the millennials, the Y generation — they're going to need to adapt," Napier-Fitzpatrick says.

That seems like an odd thing to say, given that they arguably are used to using a superior medium of message leaving.

tl;dr:

"I guess I usually just assume that it's probably not that important if you didn't text me, and you didn't send me a message on Facebook"

"So for them if a voice mail isn't practical — which most of the time it isn't — and there's a more practical way of delivering the same information, they're gonna go for that."

This is pretty much the whole ballgame. And a textbook-sounding example of Darwinism. A person can only do a maximum of N things in time t. There are an ever-growing (probably exponentially growing) number of way to communicate. Spending an outsize amount of time on a low-information-dense medium makes increasingly little sense. There are almost certainly other ways to accomplish whatever the allure is.

I'd rather you leave a message, but that's because I can access my business voicemail from a computer (and read an approximate summary). My other voicemail inbox, the personal one that I have to call and listen to? I haven't checked it in years.