Keith discusses "Email Overwhelm" and how to give yourself a few more hours in your work day.
Laura: Keith, it seems like lately, we hear a lot of complaints from people that they are totally feeling the effects of email overwhelm, so what is a tipper hack that you have to help somebody learn to control the inbox instead of letting the inbox control them?
Keith: Actually, I’ve got… This has got two answers. The first one is limit the time, you know. OK, the biggest question I want to ask people is how many emails do you get every day that are vitally important? I would say probably less than one a day, maybe even one a week. A lot of these emails are sort of important to someone, maybe not you, and they’re annoyance at best.
So what I challenge you to do is look at your email list, list of emails once a day, maybe once a day for a maximum 1 hour in a block, maybe in the morning or maybe at night, and limit it. Turn off the notifications that there’s a new email coming so you don’t get the little ‘bing,’ I’ve got a new email. Bing… OK, I know you’re there. I’ll come back to you. That’s an annoyance.
Turn off all those little signals, and say, you know, between 8 and 9 before breakfast, I’m going to check my emails and everyone will get my goodies then. Then maybe once at night, I’ll do it as well, but then that’s it. Don’t be constantly on-call. I think the on-callness, yeah, is the thing that’s getting us, the fact that we feel like we have to respond within a microsecond.
Laura: It’s interesting you say that because I actually am in the middle of writing a blog post about that because our digital world has put us in a situation where you almost feel guilty. You carry this burden if you’re not responding to things right away, and as you know, I just got back from a five-week trip to Europe where I did a pretty good job of unplugging. I worked probably between 5 and 8 hours a week total to keep my business running with my delegators and my team that were doing the, you know, the work work, but what I realized is that there’s so many things that are unimportant, so many emails we get that don’t matter, so many things that you do not need to handle right away. You do not have to be always available. You don’t have to sleep with your iPhone under your pillow, which is something that I’ve done for years. It’s OK to have a system that allows you to be productive and responding.
I only respond to emails twice a day now. I check my emails at 10 o’clock in the morning and
3 o’clock in the afternoon, and that is it. That’s it.
Keith: And I want to just unpack what you just said there, like I mean, you just mentioned you’re an iPhone insomniac. I just made that word up, but I know exactly what that means. You sleep with your phone under your pillow. Bing, you’ve got a Facebook update at 3 in the morning. Does that really matter?
But so, first of all, unpack, decode only once a day or twice a day at certain times, but I’ve mentioned there’s two parts to this question, and the second part is I want you to consider that this could be the very first task that you delegate, you know. If we’ve already organized that email was actually not that important, why don’t you ship it out to a VA, ship it out to… Like companies have receptionist. Yes, the CEO was not answering the phone, and then actually, I just made it up, but that’s a very good analogy.
The CEO of a company does not answer the phone at front line calls. You’ve got a receptionist for that. So what about employing a VA to check your emails and then feeding you through the half a dozen – they’re probably less – of the emails that are really important that you can decode like a gatekeeper.
OVERCOME ONLINE OVERWHELM
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