First, a reminder… Don’t forget to organize all your “E” files today (as described in the Alphabet Strategy post a few days ago).   Now on to our next letter…

Dec 5.  “E” is for E-Mail

E-Mail (or electronic mail) is both a blessing and a curse.  It is a fast, free way to send even large amounts of information around the world at the click of a button.  The fact that it is so fast and cheap has led to rapid increases in the amount of “spam” (unsolicited commercial email) clogging up our inbox and wasting millions of hours of productivity.

Here are my most important tips regarding email…

1. Check it at certain times during the day, and do not be a slave to email.  (Unless your job is to respond to emails in realtime).  I find that checking every couple of hours is fine, and it allows me to get uninterrupted blocks of 90+ minutes to actually get work done.
2. DO NOT check e-mail as your first priority in the morning.  We will be discussing this a bit more in a future Alphabet post, but you should not let your first thing in the morning be something that you are reacting to.  Email is usually reactive.  I like to have at least 45 minutes worth of pro-active work done before I open the e-mail up.  And you should decide what this task will be the night before.
3. Have a junk e-mail account that you can use when signing up for stuff that requires an e-mail address but that is not vital, core information.  Then check that once a day or every couple of days, this keeps from clogging up your primary account.
4. Get a gmail account, they do a nice job of removing spam, and this is a great way to manage google alerts as discussed in an earlier post… The Power of the Spider…Google Alerts
5. This is a key point…DO NOT use your Inbox as a place to store things. You want to try to end every day with your Inbox empty.  You need to create Folders that you move things into to get them out of your inbox and into places where you can access the files.  I have several… Action (means I need to do something with the file), Print (means I need to print, or download when I get a chance), Waiting (means I am waiting for something else to happen before I can take action), Read/Review (means I need to read or review when I get a chance).  When something comes into my Inbox it gets put into one of these folders and I work from the Action folder when I am doing e-Mail stuff a couple of times a day.
6. Have a good folder system for filing away emails that you might need in the future, and put things in their proper places as soon as they are no longer Action items…
7. Try to respond quickly to email where possible, a quick short reply is often much better than the long delayed one.  Be smart about this but not everything requires a lot of thinking about it.
8. Acknowledge receipt of emails with a terse note at least so that people know you received it and appreciated it.
9. Use e-Mail effectively in your marketing.  It is a killer tool.  I will talk more on this in a future post about Autoresponders…

 Tomorrow, we will move to “F” and we will be discussing the greatest of all the F words… “Family and Friends”…