What to Do With All the Email

You have too much email. I know. And it’s your fault.

You are to blame for your too much email problem.

Here’s why:

1) You treat email like text messaging when you should treat email like faxing.

When you send someone a fax, they don’t fax you back a thank you. And you don’t fax them back a “No Problem”.

That would be a waste of time.

Yet you do it over and over again every day.

How many times have you replied to an email and then the other person replied back, “Thank you”, and then you replied, “No problem”.

And so on.

End that with four letters: NNTR

That means: No Need To Reply

Insert that into your email when you reply to someone’s question. You’ll cut your email volume by a minimum of 25%.

2) You send too many emails.

Count to 10 before you send an email.

Remember, if you want to CONTROL YOUR EMAIL PROBLEM, then email should not be treated as a conversation.

Stop replying to things that don’t need a reply.

Take a look at how many emails you send per day.

Now limit yourself to 1/4 of that, starting tomorrow.

Let’s say you sent 40 emails today. That means tomorrow you get to send 10 emails.

Every email after that costs $1 – and you put that money in a jar.

At the end of the week you can burn it, flush it, give it away to charity, I don’t care.

But it’s gone.

That will get you treating email with the respect it deserves.

3) You ask for too much email (and FB and Twitter messages)

Unsubscribe from (almost) everything.

I get the following email newsletters and believe they are worthwhile, but this is it:

– Joel Marion’s (10 seconds to read)
– Ryan Deiss (15 seconds)
– Frank Kern (10 seconds and he never sends anything anyways)
– Bedros Keuilian (30-60 seconds)
– Simon Black (2 minutes)
– DailyReckoning.com (2 minutes)

Everything else is useless to me.

Give yourself 5 minutes per day to read email newsletters and make sure you BATCH the reading time.

That means you save them all for lunchtime or 5pm.

That’s it.

No mas.

Unsubscribe from everything else, and just as importantly, unfollow and unfriend everyone on FB and Twitter who isn’t someone you wake up wanting to hear from EVERY DAY.

4) You need to teach your employees how to take care of 90% of the emails that come into your business.

Any questions they can’t handle should be put into a word document and sent to you once per week.

5) You need to minimize personal email.

See point #2 above.

Use the phone instead.

But the bottom line is this…

Your inbox is your responsibility.

If you get too much email then you simply haven’t set up the right systems to protect your time.

Email, due to its ubiquitous nature, makes smart people stupid.

We fire off stupid emails just because email is there…and it can get you into a LOT of trouble (i.e. smart people stupidly replying to all, sending something in the heat of the moment during an argument, etc.).

This should NOT be an issue with email.

The ‘little man inside your head’ in charge of filtering what you say should be able to stop you by the time you type your message and go to hit send.

He should have time to say,

“DUDE, Do NOT send that email!!!”

And you should listen.

Be self-reliant.

Send less email.

Treat email – and the people’s time you are emailing – with respect and you’ll have less email to deal with.

Ask yourself, “How do I really want to spend my life?”

Is it answering email from strangers?

Is it reading yet another email newsletter?

Or is playing with your kid and enjoying your family time?

Do your work and then cut it off.

Something has to give.

It’s your choice…don’t become a slave to email.

Does Donald Trump have an email problem? No.

Does Donald Trump even have email? Probably not.

Something to think about,

Craig Ballantyne

“You can manufacture whatever kind of life you want.”
– Dan Kennedy