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Secrets to Success
Deborah Cole Micek |
Self-control is the trick
to reducing wasted time
from e-mailsSecond of four parts
E-mail is hailed as one of the world's No. 1 one communication tools, but lately, it is also guilty of being the world's No. 1 annoyance.
Unwanted e-mails cost companies more than $8.9 billion last year, according to a study by San Francisco-based Ferris Research.
In many ways, e-mail has become a virus in and of itself. Not to mention all the junk e-mail we are forced to sift through if we do not have a program like Pau Spam filtering through all the spam for us.
In a recent interview with Hoala Greevy, the creator of Hawaii-based PauSpam.com said, "While it can vary greatly on how much the average employee spends dealing with spam and viruses each day, we are now seeing an average of 80 percent of all the e-mail we filter to be either spam or viruses."
That is an incredible percentage of wasted time and distractions from what is most important in our workday. And all just to read or sift through other people's advertisements.
You can avoid the distractions e-mail brings by implementing a new policy we have developed in the way you check e-mail.
My coaching clients are gaining as much as one full workday in free time just implementing this new system. Model this system in your workday to maximize your time. But be forewarned, it is controversial, daring and challenges the e-mail addict.
1) Check e-mail no more than three times a day at set times in the day. (If your job requires you to check e-mail more often, just be sure to do it on a specific schedule.) Otherwise, use my schedule below to adapt to your client needs.
>> First time -- when my day begins -- to filter any emergency e-mails from my coaching clients.2) When a new e-mail message comes through, do not halt what you are working on to attend to e-mail.
>> Second time -- midday to catch up on new clients requesting appointments.
>> Third time -- at the end of my workday -- to go through my inbox to take care of new message requests requiring my immediate attention.3) Ask yourself, How often do I check my mailbox or run to the post office to see if a new envelope has been delivered? Just because our access to e-mail is right at our fingertips, we should not be distracted by this tool that can either be used for good -- or for evil.
4) Install some type of spam filtering software to combat the spam monster. I compare this automatic filtering to what I would need to pay an assistant to filter through my mail manually.
"E-mail was never designed for what it's become now," Greevy tells us. That is why he created a sophisticated filtering program, Pau Spam, in response to all the problems business owners were facing trying to sift through their junk mail to get to the most important e-mails coming from their clients.
5) The next thing you will want to do is organize all your incoming mail. This will allow you to compartmentalize all the projects you are working on in the most productive manner possible. We will highlight three easy ways you can do this in next week's column.
WARNING for e-mail addicts: Implementing this new system may require you to first examine some limiting beliefs of how you could make this work and give yourself an extra day every week.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
John-Paul Micek is the lead business coach at RPM Success Group Inc. Reach him at JPM@RPMsuccess.com or toll-free at (888) 334-8151.
Deborah Cole Micek, chief executive officer of RPM Success Group, is a business success coach and life strategist. Reach her at DCM@RPMsuccess.com or toll-free at (888) 334-8151.
Access an expanded version of this article at www.GetCoachedforFree.com.
