6 Ways To Save Yourself From Drowning In E-mails
It’s a new day. Without doubt
this is going to be a positive and productive day. Then it hits you. You look
at your phone and see the little flashing light. You have mail. And you know
it’s going to be lots and lots and lots of mail. Suddenly your mood crashes and
the brightness of the day seems irrelevant. Before you do anything, you are
going to have to wade through your emails.
So how do you stop yourself
from getting this sinking feeling every single day and how can you turn dealing
with your email into a positive and productive experience?
When You Are Drowning In
Email The First Thing To Do Is To Manage The Flow
There is no other way to deal
with email, you are going to need a proper system in place to confront
it. A consistent, ruthlessly applied system. If you don’t have a system
and stick to it then you are never going to successfully get on top of your
email problem. Your system should have a simple goal. At the end of each day
your inbox will be completely empty and everything essential has been dealt
with. How you set up your email filtering system is entirely up to you, but
let’s outline a generally successful structure for you right now.
Step
one.
Create a folder. It can be called anything you want. In
this folder you are going to store all the emails that need attention, but that
do not need to be, or cannot be replied to, or dealt with, that day.
An alternative to creating a folder is to make use of colour
highlighting options in your email system. However, it does not feel as
satisfying to see lots of coloured emails as it feels to see your inbox
with less emails in it.
Step
two.
Create an archive folder. This is where you are going to move
anything that you think will be useful to keep, but that does not require a
reply.
Step
three.
This is the filtering stage. Without stopping, go through your
entire inbox. If you don’t need it, then delete it. Do this liberally. If you
need to follow-up on it later, move it to the action folder. If it is
useful but you don’t need to take any action, archive it.
Step
four.
Deal with your email. Now your inbox only contains things that
need a response right now. Deal with these as quickly as possible, trying to
spend less than one minute per email.
After taking these steps, all you will have left in your inbox are
the emails that need to be dealt with before the end of the day. All you
need to do then is to go back into your inbox halfway through the day, go
through the process again and deal with those remaining emails before you stop
for the day. Also you will need to go into your actions folder once per day and
work through those emails as quickly as possible.
It’s certainly not a complex system. The important point here is
to have a systematic approach to dealing with your emails that achieves two
aims:
1. Deals with your entire inbox in one go, leaving you a clear
view of exactly what needs to be done right now.
2. Gives you a positive feeling at the end of every single day
by achieving an empty inbox.
Dealing with the emails that arrive in a ruthless, consistent
fashion is great. But unless you slow the flow of email you will continue to
feel like you are drowning. Just like the hideous torture of waterboarding,
although you are never actually going to drown, the feeling that you might have
can be emotionally detrimental.
So the next step is to
take some simple actions that will stem the flow of email forever.
1. Deal
with subscriptions
Take the bold step of unsubscribing from every single mailing
list you are currently on. Don’t stop and think that you may want to read
something at some stage, just unsubscribe from the lot. I bet you won’t miss
any of it.
And if you do, then simply create a separate webmail account and
use that to subscribe to mailing lists. Then when you do get spare time you can
go into that account and flick through it to your heart’s content.
By doing this, you will also avoid the temptation to get
distracted by the latest great thing that someone is telling you!
2. Send
shorter emails
You don’t want to appear rude, but you should deal with your
emails in as few words as possible. So cut corners and get straight to the
point. This will save you and the person reading time.
3. Send
less emails
Do you really need to reply to this email? Take a look through
all the replies you have sent in the past week. How many of those were actually
just acknowledgement’s or confirmations? So don’t bother sending that sort of
response again. In 90% of cases the person sending it doesn’t require or expect
a response anyway.
4.
Utilise your email footer
Most people don’t even bother to have anything at the bottom of
their sent emails by default, other than perhaps a disclaimer policy.
First of all make sure you have a proper signature there. This
will stop you from being one of those people who types something like “Regards,
John” 50 times a week.
Secondly, create an email policy and put it ther which leads me
to the next point…
5. Have
a proper email policy
By setting-up an email policy, you can guide people into sending
you better emails, or not sending them at all. This policy should be a few
lines and be aimed at reducing the number of emails you get.
For example, if you don’t deal with a certain aspect of your
business, perhaps your personal assistant does, then it can be tedious to
endlessly forward emails to them, or respond and do their job for them.
So initially put your email policy in the footer of your emails.
Then set-up an autoresponder containing that policy. In the autoresponder state
that if the email pertains to certain topics people should forward
the email they have just sent onto the personal assistant. Say that due to the
volume of emails you receive you cannot respond personally so if they need a
response they need to take action and forward it. Then you can simply
delete the emails as they come in.
6. Post
a frequently asked questions page on your website
It should be obvious, if you are getting the same email
questions time and time again. If you are, then it makes sense to take 20
minutes to create a webpage containing answers and then include that in the
email policy you have placed in the footer and in the autoresponder.
You are going to profit wildly from stopping yourself from
drowning in email by gaining the most precious commodity of all. If I gave you
an extra hour every day you would be delighted. Think what you could do with an
extra hour per day, seven hours each week. That is a lot of time to deal with
things in your business that will make you money, rather than trying to stick
your fingers in the dike to stop the email flood.
The way you filter your emails will be very personal to you. You
could try starting with the system I have outlined here, and then adapt it
depending on the volume and type of emails you receive. The key point is to
commit yourself now to setting up a mental system to ruthlessly deal with your
email at the start of every day.
Once you have done this, you can decide how many times after
that you want to go into your email account each day. I would suggest a second
time only, just after lunch. Anything that arrives in the afternoon can be
dealt with the next morning. There is no harm in scanning your inbox before you
finish for the day just to make sure nothing crucial arrives late.
But as you may have already guessed, even more important than
setting up a personal system is taking active steps now to stop future emails
from arriving at all. A bit of time spent now removing emails from ever
arriving and educating people on the type of emails you wish to receive, and
telling them what to do in all the obvious cases, can transform your position
and gain you valuable time each day.
There is no magic formula for dealing with email, but once you
have a system and have set up your own gatekeeper, then giving yourself more
time to make money can be a reality.
Or Perhaps
There Is A Magic Formula….
One way you can cut out 90% of your email time is to hire a
personal assistant (PA). These can be hired from outsourcing sites for a
reasonable hourly rate. You can then train them by giving them access to your
business email and then using a tool such as Skype to go through your email
inbox every day for a week. After that, they can log into your email account
every morning and only forward emails on to you that are absolutely vital for
you to personally deal with.
So the only additional step you will need to take is to set
up a different mailbox. If you receive personal emails, then it’s obviously
advisable to steer them into your new email account rather than allowing your
personal assistant to read them. Yes this will cost money, but a freelance
personal assistant will potentially cost a fraction of the money you can make
by freeing up several hours per day in some cases.
I thought I would throw this idea into the mix at the very end
to give you food for thought. Dealing with your inbox does not have to be a job
you personally do. As long as you are confident you are dealing with the emails
you NEED to deal with, why do you have to go through them all by yourself?
No comments:
Post a Comment