Hello, this is Laura Lee Rose – author of TimePeace: Making peace with time – and I am a business and efficiency coach that specializes in time management, project management and work-life balance strategies. I help busy professionals and entrepreneurs create effective systems so that they can comfortably delegate to others, be more profitable and have time to enjoy life even if they don’t have time to learn new technology or train their staff. I have a knack for taking big ideas and converting them into smart, sound, and actionable ideas.
At the end of the day, I transform the way you run your business into a business you love to run.
Today’s comment came from a busy professional and an entrepreneur:
How can I get organized?
A favorite client is nothing short of an organizational jedi. She has the most empty email box I have ever seen, aside from a brand new one. I am looking to inherit top tips, tricks, apps and habits to help me organize projects. I know there is Asana, etc, but email, docs, reporting all seem to demand an overhaul currently.
There are several things you can do “right now” without new tools. You just need to change how you currently handle your email. In fact – you merely need to deliberately and mindfully handle your email.
Email, like instant messages and phone calls, are not necessarily urgent or important. Unfortunately, many people constantly interrupt their attention and tasks to review and answer non-urgent and sometimes unimportant emails. There are several things you can do to not only organize your email but reduce your time spent.
Top Tips and Tricks to organize your email and projects:
1) Take a look at your email “Message Rules”. Most emails have this feature that allows you to automatically categorize certain messages to certain folders, automatic replies, and even automatically delete them. For example, you can create rules to automatically place newsletters, certain reports, informational emails (that you regularly receive) in a separate folder for later review.
2) Use your auto-responders regularly. You can automatically respond to client’s general questions by pointing them to your FAQ or support website. You can automatically respond to clients that you received their inquiry and will respond within 1 business day (or your SLA – Service Level Agreement timeframe).
3) Take a look at creating different email accounts for different purposes. Not all clients or emails need the same level of response. For example, create a info@yourdomain.com for clients seeking sales and product information. Have a separate personal email for your personal mail. Have a VIP email address for those premium clients that are paying a high price for your services. Have a general Support@yourdomain.com for free-mium clients. This way you can delegate the info@yourdomain.com to your admin or sales staff. Auto-respond your free-mium clients to your FAQ and websites. And personally handle your high-paying clients.
4) Start incorporating certain naming and subject line conventions. For instance, if your employees or project team were to include “Project X: Response needed by XX date”; – you can automatically prioritize and file it without having to open the email. If they included “Project Y: Informational ONLY”, your Message Rule would automatically put that in your Project Y file.
5) Schedule blocks of time to review your email and email folders. Don’t allow your email to interrupt your more important activities. Instead, block an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, to handle your email. Since you have your auto-responders and message rules setup, your clients are already getting an immediate response and you don’t need to interrupt your attention.
Conclusion
By adopting a few naming conventions and automation tools (as well as documenting your FAQ and supporting issues), you should be able to easily reduce you time on your email box.
If you need additional help on this topic, please contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info
I am a business coach and this is what I do professionally. It’s easy to sign up for a complementary one-on-one coaching call, just use this link https://www.timetrade.com/book/WFSFQ