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It’s a problem that all Internet Marketers experience: Information Overload. Every day there’s something “new” or “urgent” pulling our attention away from our main goal: Growing our business. One major time-sucking culprit is email, and taming your email inbox has become a necessity in getting things done each day.
Maximize Your Online Productivity
Marketing on the Internet has become a crowded arena, and it’s essential that you use each minute wisely to maximize your productivity. While email has made it super-simple to keep in touch with colleagues or JV partners, it’s also opened the floodgates to all kinds of unimportant email that get past our spam filters — newsletters, free reports, and the next best income opportunity. For many, email has become an unmanageable time sucker.
6 Strategies for Taming Your Email Inbox
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1. Limit Your Exposure
I used to check my email constantly, in fear that I might miss something really important. In the process, I wasted a good part of my day in this unproductive activity. I’ve found that it’s best to set a limit on the time you’ll spend reading email and stick to it. No exceptions. Once or twice per day is more than enough time to check emails. There’s very little that can’t “wait ‘til morning.”
2. Set Up Multiple Email Accounts
While this may seem counterintuitive, hear me out. I really started streamlining my email access when I opened up a second and third Gmail account for my business.
I restrict my contacts in my primary account to only those that have a direct impact on my business: Lead and sale notifications, mentors, and potential JV partners. This account is most important for my business bottom-line; as a result, I check these emails most often, once in the morning and once in the evening.
I use my 2nd email account for things like newsletters or blogs to which I subscribed, news from product vendors and other company business. I check these emails once every few days.
The third email account is for “junk emails”, such as those you receive when you sign up for Free Classifieds or List Builders. These are emails I rarely if every read, but by opening a separate Gmail account I am able to keep my primary inbox clean.
3. Set Up Folders to Organize Your Messages
We all receive emails that don’t require immediate action, but want to save for future reference. In these cases, it’s essential to create Folders. In Gmail, you can set up an unlimited number of Folders, listed alphabetically on the sidebar next to your inbox. Once click on the Folder and you have immediate access to your saved messages. Yet, your inbox remains organized and uncluttered with messages that serve you no immediate purpose.
4. Utilize Your Email Filters and Archive Features
Most email providers offer some kind of filtering mechanism for keeping emails organized. In Gmail, you can apply filters to incoming messages that will label your email according to your instructions. Even more useful, you can automatically have an incoming email moved to an appropriate folder for later reading, keeping your inbox clean.
5. Segment Your Email
Gmail has recently rolled out a system for prioritizing your email, called Priority Inbox. Google actually tracks your email habits, which emails you open most often and begins to prioritize these emails as “important”. As more email messages come in, you can tell Google when something is inappropriately labeled and Google will “learn” your preferences.
In this way, your Priority Inbox will ultimately reflect your most important and useful messages. Although it’s still in testing mode, Priority Inbox bears watching as another useful feature of Google Mail.
6. Housecleaning
Email numbers pile up over time; a subscription here, an inquiry there. All of a sudden, your once organized email inbox becomes, once again, unmanageable. What can you do?
Once every month or so, I do a complete “housecleaning” of my account inboxes.
I go through the email I receive with a sharp-edged knife, and I “cut out” (i.e. unsubscribe) from any emails that are no longer serving a positive experience in my life. Be ruthless in this effort and you can do wonders in limiting the amount of useless email you receive.
By using these strategies for taming your email inbox, you can potentially add hours to each day, just by eliminating the necessity for going through useless and unproductive emails. Instead, this time can be used on Income Producing Activities for your business, and greatly improve your bottom-line.
Can you add to this list? Leave a comment!
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