How To Manage Email Better And Fall In Love With Your Inbox - Yes It's Possible!

Email is a seemingly constant source of frustration for soloists but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how to manage email better.

I’m not quite sure when this happened, but at some point in the last decade, e-mail went from being a modern, time-saving business tool to an intrusive burden that sucks all our time and never goes away. It’s no wonder that e-mail has been referred to as the most hated form of personal technology.

If you approach your email inbox with a cold sense of horror on a Monday morning you’re definitely not alone. Believe me, I’m all too familiar with the numbing feeling of dread that can descend on hearing the chime of your inbox or seeing the new mail notification on your phone.

Email is essential for any soloist, and it’s not going to go away anytime soon, so all this resentment and negativity, while understandable, isn’t really helping. Surely it would be far more sensible to focus our energies on liking, or at least co-habiting peacefully with our email inboxes?

Here’s how to manage email better.

Why do our inboxes cause us so much angst?

Email has become the go-to communication tool for pretty much everything from arranging a night out with friends, finding new business, managing projects, selling stuff and getting our daily dose of news. This means the sheer volume of emails most of us receive on a daily basis can be overwhelming at best.

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The problem with the hundreds of irrelevant or at least non-urgent emails that clog up our inboxes is that we have to sort through them to find the ticking time bombs that are buried underneath. We know that if we don’t do this quickly enough, it’s highly likely they will explode in our faces.

This unpredictability is one of the main reasons why e-mail is so compelling yet so stressful. While around 80% of the messages we receive are probably useless or irrelevant, 20% of them are useful, interesting and/or require our attention. It’s the chance that we’ll find a gem in our inbox, or something urgent that we have to reply to that keeps us checking our email repetitively over and over again, even when we should be doing other things.

Learning to like your inbox

Unplugging from email altogether is not really an option for anyone trying to run a business and that means that if you’re going to avoid pulling out your hair on a regular basis, you’ll have to find a way to keep your stress levels manageable and your inbox under control.

Here’s how I did it.

Determine what role you want e-mail to play in your business

A little while ago I realised that one of the reasons why my email was getting so out of control was that I was trying to use it for everything (and still probably do, but I am more conscious of it now). From group conversations to quick questions, introductions and longer discussions with clients or suppliers, email was my go-to way of communicating, even if I could have saved time and effort picking up the phone.

So now, I schedule in specific call time every day or second day to pick up the phone and speak to people ‘in my world’. I do smile when my phone call messages end up being replied to via email, never the less, it is one mechanism where I make sure I get out of ‘email mode’. Not perfect, but a distraction none the less.

I also changed my attitude towards e-mail. Instead of seeing it as the enemy I tried to start looking at the benefits. By defining what I didn’t want to use e-mail for, I could more easily see how email could be of benefit to my business by facilitating relationships, keeping a written record of important conversations and making sure I didn’t miss important updates and news. It has also been the primary source of relationship building with the Flying Solo team for example. It’s been fun to take my FS relationships offline, however the main way I have built and kept relationships with the FS team is via e-mail, so I guess it all can’t be bad

E-mail is one of the certainties of running your own business, but it doesn’t have to be a source of resentment or endless frustration. Using alternatives wherever possible and defining your own boundaries and the role that email plays in your business can help you learn to build a healthy sustainable long term relationship with your email inbox.

Are you an e-mail hater or have you learned how to manage email better?

See more at https://www.flyingsolo.com.au/technology/managing-email/how-to-manage-email-better

Jo Macdermott heads up the team at Next Marketing whose ‘why’ is to help business owners punch above their weight. The Next Marketing team are really good at understanding ROI and commercial outcomes. Get in touch :)