In Delegation by Dictation, on the Run the first post of this 7 Cool Tools for Fast Delegation series I showed you how to use Voxie Pro Recorder for recording and quickly emailing audio files to your personal assistant or other colleagues.
Voxie is simple to use, however, some people aren’t keen on using apps. So is there an even simpler way to email audio notes to others?
Yes there is. And after setting it up, all it involves is dialing a telephone number, speaking, then hanging up.
The unified messaging service eFax Pro allows you to have one phone number that receives both faxes and voicemail messages. It sends them via email as a PDF or WAV audio file, respectively. This is very efficient in this era of distributed workforces, outsourcing and workshifting.
When receiving a telephone call, your eFax Pro service plays your recorded greeting* and then emails the WAV file off to the designated email addresses that you configure in your account. You can specify up to five email addresses.
So, picture this. You’re driving along and a task comes to mind that you need to delegate to a colleague. You call your eFax number (using legal hands-free means, of course, Mr. Lawyer), listen through the greeting, dictate your message, then hang up. The person or people specified in eFax Pro will receive that audio file within seconds.
If you’re an Evernote user, you can specify one of the Send Email Addresses as your Send To Evernote email address. Share your Default Notebook with your assistant, and they have easy access to the audio notes you ‘phone in’.
The neat thing about Evernote in this scenario is that the note includes an in-built audio player as well as the standard note area for your assistant or team member to transcribe key parts of your message as they listen to it. This is very streamlined compared with an email attachment that they need to download (and therefore decide where to save, how to name, etc.), then play the audio file.
However, if you’re using a good document management system that makes it easy to file emails and their attachments under Contacts, the email method is likely to be more efficient than Evernote. It depends on the existing suite of apps you use in your business as to which approach is best for you and your team.
*There is one disadvantage to this approach. If you’re a prolific delegator via dictation, you might find it a tad tedious to listen through your recorded voicemail message each time you want to record and send an audio file in this way. For me, that’s why I use Voxie Pro Recorder instead.
But again, it’s contextual. For example, at Paradox we provide a Virtual Marketing Assistant service where clients can delegate marketing-related tasks such as blog posts to write, social media updates to do, and so on. Some clients prefer to use Voxie, while other lower-tech clients are happier to ‘phone a friend’ with eFax Pro, so to speak.
At the time of writing, eFax Pro costs less than $10 per month, so it’s a great option to ‘speed delegate’ through your busy day.
Image credit: Posh24
