You've experienced it anytime you're about to leave a message for someone: You sit through 30 seconds of instructions on what to do to leave your message when it is common knowledge that we wait for the beep and speak. And then we turn around and make the same greeting on our own answering machine when we get one. The vicious cycle continues.

There are 3 things that you need to communicate to a person who is bound to get your answering machine:

1) A brief introduction

2) You're not available

3) A reminder to leave a contact number

The reasoning behind this is simple. Some people may not realize they're initially getting a machine and quality on the machines are much better than they used to be, so you want to communicate quickly that you aren't there. to minimize confusion.

The reminder to leave a number is important because people leaving a message will get so wrapped up in delivering the information quickly that they often neglect the most important piece: contact information. And don't expect to rely on caller-id either, since more and more people either install call blocking, or call from numbers that are re-routed, resulting in incorrect caller-id results.

There are two opposing schools of thought on the introduction. One states that you should never leave personal information up for grabs on the greeting, while others maintain that a simple first name won't hurt anyone. The answer lies in your own personal comfort level, but the advantage to announcing your phone number in your greeting is that you will reduce the number of wrong-number messages that are left for you. Simply using a name might not be enough to inform the caller they called the wrong number. However, using a phone number in the message is very impersonal and makes for a more robotic greeting. Utilizing both the phone number and your first name in the greeting is a slightly longer, but best of both worlds solution.

An example of all this could be as follows: "You've reached 555-555-5555. We're sorry we missed your call, so make sure you leave a number where we can get back to you. Thank you".

Or, for a personalized message: "Hey, it's Julie. Sorry to miss you call, but make sure you leave a number so I can call you back right away! Thanks".

That's it. Everything else that is often put into answering machine messages simply prolongs the time a caller must wait before leaving what is ultimately going to be an abbreviated version of the conversation you'll ultimately have with them anyway. Furthermore, with the continued proliferation of answering machines with computerized instructions after the initial greeting, callers often end up hearing you tell them to leave a message after the tone, only to have a computer instruct them to do the exact same thing moments later. If you want to make 100% certain that your callers get all the information they need, call your own answering machine and listen to whatever additional instructions are given after your own greeting. Eliminate the redundant information given by both yourself and the automated process and you'll find yourself getting much more informative messages from callers, as well as happier callers to boot.