2011 December Blogging Challenge-Day 3 & 4- That Thing Called Email

2011 December Blogging Challenge- Day 3 & 4-  That Thing Called Email

 It was a challenge to keep up with this challenge while we were out of town for a few days with our son and the Wellington Colts Travel Team baseball at a tournament up in Lakeland and Plant City Florida. It was also tough because most of the time was filled with team activities and having fun with the 9 year old boys and their parents. 

So I had to think creatively about the challenge. 

Day 3 and Day 4 of the blogging challenge was creating a system of checking emails without getting sucked into the vacuum- looking up at the clock and discovering your entire day was in email! 

I took a class on time management recently and the instructor said that email is a time robber. Email is everyone else's control of your time. Email is everyone else's agenda. 

Remember the days of "you got mail" and how excited you were to get email? Now email is a chore. It has lust its' luster and magic. 

In our business of course there are important emails to answer just as their are important calls to take. However, just because you have email in your box does not mean it needs your immediate attention in most cases. That was difficult to learn. 

So these last two days I have been working on how to manage all the email that I get. I am the worst at organizing emails because I just get way too many emails and I have different email addresses for different things. 

The first thing I did was have all the more junky ones not filter into my main reading email box anymore. I have an email address for google alerts. I only go into that one once a day and all my google alerts are in there together. No sorting, no worrying about if I miss one. The same thing goes for my personal coupon emails. They all go into a coupon email and I don't have to see those unless I want to. 

I have my important ones- and there are still way too many of those. My usual response to the overwhelm of too many emails was instead of sorting through them just stop looking at them there and move to a new email address- which of course are all free on gmail and mac mail. So then I have a fresh new look and not so many emails. But then over time that new box will get just as full and annoying because I don't have time to sit there and sort through so many emails. 

I am going to turn the task over to our VA. She will look through all the emails, create the filters, unsubscribe from products and services I am no longer interested in or have time for and delete all the junk. She will then mark all the important real estate stuff in gmail with a gold star and all the important coaching emails with a purple star. 

Then I started to set a timer for emails. I no longer look at my emails first thing in the morning. Most of the time first thing in the morning is mostly the junk stuff anyways. So I will attend to income generating tasks first thing in the morning and then at 10 a.m. check my emails. I will scan through to find the important ones and address those right away if they have to do with a client or a prospect. The timer will be set for 25 minutes which is my Pomodoro technique I learned in time management. 

Then I will scan through the emails again at 1p.m. setting my timer for 10 minutes. This will repeat at 4 p.m. and around 8 p.m. 

I will also start checking on the emails on my iPhone instead of my computer. This again will save me time and be more productive because from my iPhone I assess the importance of an email with more strictness. I want to move to trash much more assertively than I do from my computer. I can also shift through the different email boxes fast and easily on the iPhone. I also tend to send much shorter responses from my phone. 

So we will see how this email task turns out. Focusing on income producing actions and activities is the major focus of a business when you are the business owner. So that has to be at the forfront.