Never check email in the morning. That’s the title of a really great book about managing time by Julie Morgenstern and it’s pretty good advice. It may or may not be practical advice for you — you may have lots of reasons why you must check email first thing in the morning — but the truth is that these days, for most of us, email is a wonderful and indispensible tool — and the bane of our very existence at the same time.
It’s the very thing that — more than anything else — keeps us from marketing our business.
Besides following the very good advice of only checking email at certain times of the day, your goal should be that you have a clean inbox after every time you check it. Yes, clean it out.
That means acting on every single email you get during each session when you check.
I subscribe to the philosophy of time management espoused by Mark Forster, which is “Do It Tomorrow.” This doesn’t mean you’re procrastinating. In fact, it means just the opposite. If something absolutely does not require action TODAY — and most things do not — then put it off until tomorrow when you can plan to do it at the best time.
Here’s a brief summary of how I set up my email so that I can manage it more easily, with less stress, and I always have a clean inbox:
Decide that when you are going to check email that you’ve given yourself permission that that’s what you’re going to do for the next half hour or so and do nothing else.
Manage your email with some sort of email manager such as Outlook, MacMail or Entourage. You’ll save yourself countless headaches by using a good email manager.
TIP: If you’re using AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo for your email, stop it. Get a real email address with your business name in it (i.e. marty@soulproprietorcoach.com). You’ll look far more professional than using free email accounts. (If you want to know the best way to use those free email accounts,
click here.)
Set up 3 folders in your inbox: ACTION, TOMORROW, and REFERENCE.
Let ALL of your email flow into your inbox.
Then, one by one, evaluate each email and do something with it.
If it will take you less than 2 minutes to respond or to do what the email is asking, apply David Allen’s rule and do it right then. Either delete that email or move it to your REFERENCE folder.
If it is something that will need your attention today but is not immediately urgent, put it in your ACTION folder. Then before the end of the day, complete all those tasks and then either delete those emails or move them to the REFERENCE folder.
If its something that is not urgent, place it in your TOMORROW folder. Then, tomorrow, in your first email session for the day, handle all those items in the TOMORROW folder, and then either delete them or move them to the REFERENCE folder.
Ta-DA! You always have a clean inbox!
If an email contains a link that you want to visit, resist the temptation to click on that link and instead, add that email to your TOMORROW folder. Set aside time tomorrow to surf the net and give yourself permission to spend your time doing that if that’s what you want to do. It’s okay, really, so long as you’re not avoiding something else — like marketing.
A side benefit is that if you’re not clicking links in emails you’ll save a lot of money by not making impulse purchases. Looking at that tomorrow puts you in a better frame of mind — a less urgent frame of mind — and allows you to think a purchase through more clearly. You may find you don’t want it at all, whatever it is.
The temptation, once you discover how well this works, is to then OVER organize your inbox, making folders for all kinds of things, and making rules to send emails all over the place.
This creates two problems: You then have way too many folders to check for new email AND you can never find anything you need later because you are trying to remember where you sent a particular email from a particular person.
If all finished emails that you might need later are in the REFERENCE folder, then you always know where to look or where to do a search.
The payoff for you: ALL your email gets handled, nothing slips through the cracks, there’s no stress, and you can always find something later.
Now, having said all of this, if you work with lots of different clients as I do, and you have lots of email correspondence going back and forth between you, you might want to set up a CLIENT folder with a folder inside for each one of your clients and then set up a RULE that filters all those emails into their appropriate folders.
Still, having every email come through your inbox is preferable because you can make a decision about what to do with it on the spot, and you never miss something important IF you are truly keeping your inbox cleaned out.
Following this routine alone has done more for improving my productivity and lowering my stress level than anything else I’ve ever done, AND I have much more time to work on marketing my own business.
And here’s something else I’ve discovered about handling email: When you’re excited about and passionate about and engaged with your business, you won’t find email to be much of a distraction. You’ll deal with it because you have to, but you won’t be distracted by Internet wild goose chases because you’ll want to get right back to managing your business and your marketing and serving your many clients.
