Why And How I Canceled My Email

Hey everyone, this is Russell and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast where you can increase your traffic, conversions, and sales in just 10 minutes a day. And now here's your host, Russell Brunson. All right everyone, so late night, just got back from the grocery store, heading home, and I want to tell you about something cool that I think I'm doing that I want to recommend to you guys to do, I think. I'm pretty sure I am. I'm kind of stressing out about it right now, but I think that after I get through like the withdrawal symptoms, this process is gonna be awesome. So, as some of you guys know, we just had our book launch, ClickFunnels launch, a baby, we have our live event coming up, we just moved offices, we're about to move our house, and all this change, all these things, and it's been insane keeping up with everything. On top of that you have all the normal things that we have to deal with, right? Email, and for me, some of you guys know through our coaching program, I give our higher-end clients access to me through Voxer, so I get Voxers all the time. There's just all these things that are pressing on me and it's like, it's getting to the point where it's kind of hard to bear all of it. And so I've been trying to think like, how do I structure things differently so that I can get out from under this pressure? I remember Dan Gable, who's, you know, those of you guys who know wrestling, he's like the Michael Jordan of wrestling. Time someone asked him about pressure, like, "How do you deal with all this pressure that's on your life?" He says— they asked him if he believed in pressure. He's like, "Well, I believe in it. It's there." He's like, "I just don't choose to put myself underneath it." Anyway, I was thinking about that. I feel like I've been putting myself underneath all this pressure and I have this horrible problem where I just say yes to everything and I want to do all these things because they get exciting to me. So I've been trying to weed things out and trying to simplify my life and everything. Anyway, over the last 24 hours or so, I've made some big jumps, like some crazy huge leaps. I'm in the withdrawal process right now and it's stressing me out but I think it's going to be really good long-term. So first off, first step was email. I had to get control of my email. I have had the same email address for like 12 years. Everyone in the world has it. I'm on a million newsletters, a million different things. Right now on average, I was trying to measure between— I use a service called SaneBox which takes all your junk and tries to filter out and get rid of it before it gets to your inbox. But even with that, I get over 1,000 emails a day in my inbox. Between that and SaneBox, it's about 3,500 emails a day. It's insane. I don't even know how— yeah, if you've ever emailed me and I didn't write back, that's probably why. It just gets so overwhelming to me. Every time I log in, I'm just like sick to my stomach. I don't even know what to do. It just never goes away. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. I've been so scared to not have it. What happens if I miss an email? What if I don't see something? Because I'm checking my phone a million times a day because email's coming in so fast, it's pushing emails off the screen. I don't want to miss anything. And there's just all this stress that comes from it. And so the first thing I decided to do was I needed to kill my email address. Which was crazy, so I set up a new email address and then I was like, well I don't wanna just tell everyone my new email address 'cause then I'm gonna start getting a million emails. So what I did is I set up an autoresponder thing on my old email address and I'm still gonna have Kelsey, my assistant, go in each day and just browse to make sure that I'm not missing anything super important like bills or things like that, who knows, whatever could come through. But now there's an autoresponder so when you email my old email address it pops up and says, new email address, how to contact me inside. You open up and basically says, hey, you know, I was getting 3,500 emails a day, I can't keep up with it, and, but if you're awesome, and I'm assuming you are, and you want to contact me, then this is how you can do it. And I push them to a form to fill out. So I push them to a Wufoo form, and basically the Wufoo form says, what's your name, your email address, your Skype number, and what's your question? And so when someone goes to that form, they don't have, they don't know my new email address, but they can fill it out, and then I get that Wufoo emails me the form that they got. So the form pops into my email address, it says name, email, you know, Skype. And their question, and look at that question. If it's something for me, I can respond if I want to, or if I don't, I can forward it to Kelsey or to Brent or someone on my team to take care of it, and that person never gets to me. And if it is someone they want to hear from, they can respond back to them, and then that person's got access to my inbox. And so anyway, I did it. I did that on Friday before I left. It's Saturday night, so 24 hours, and it's stressing me out because my email box only has like 3 emails from people who've actually got the thing, filled it out, and 2, I think 2 of them I didn't I didn't want to respond to, so I forwarded them to someone else, and then one was someone I wanted to, and I responded to them, and that was it. And it's crazy. I keep going back to my old email box and scanning through to make sure I'm not missing anything, but for the most part, it's really refreshing. There's no one contacting me, and it's kind of stressing me out because of that, which is kind of cool. Next thing was Voxer. So I've got my high-end clients on Voxer, which used to be really, really easy, but as we've grown, it's gotten more and more, and so I always try to get back to people really, really fast, and the problem is that means I'm answering Voxers all day long, all night long, like all the time, and I just needed to get more control over that. So what I did is one of my friends from our mastermind group, his name's Joe McCall, he bought me a new iPhone while we were there, which was super cool. So he gave me this brand new iPhone, and so I turned this into my new iPhone. I got a new install of Voxer on it, and I just gave this one to close people that I really need to communicate with. People I want instantly, like anytime to contact, like my wife, my team, things like that. And then the other phone, I kept all my Voxer conversations and I kept it at my office. I didn't bring it home this weekend. I don't even have it. People are probably Voxing me and I don't have the ability to respond back to them. And so I'm gonna respond back to them on Monday when I get to the office and then I'll just have that at the office and I'll do client work there and then when I'm home, I don't do client work at home anymore, which is kinda cool. So that was kinda the next barrier that I put up And then next thing is my assistant Kelsey's been my assistant for 4 or 5 years. She's been doing a support role and kind of assistant, you know, things like that. And now I'm trying to make her more of an assistant. And each day she comes to my office and then gives me a write-up of what's happened the next day, tells me who I got calls with, what's happening. She's been kind of controlling my whole life. She's been checking my email. She's trying to like put up as many barriers around me and take care of me so I don't have to stress out. She gets my lunches now. She, you know, all these, all these kind of things so I can focus on what I do best. Which is what brings the money in. The next thing I'm going to start doing is I'm going to try to start— I don't know about you guys, but at the beginning of the year I set a goal. One of my goals was to spend more time with my kids than I do at the office. So far I haven't done that yet, but these are the first steps to get me to that point. Next, I'm going to start trying to spend more time in the mornings with my wife, maybe take her to a movie once or twice a week in the mornings, spend more time with my kids, coming home a little earlier. Anyway, I'm trying to get this under control. It's hard for me. You guys are like me, like serial entrepreneurs. It's been a hard, painful process. Like, it's cool we can keep checking my phone and there's nothing there for me. There's no one to talk to, which is good. So I got to focus on who I love the most. And so it's just been this— like I said, I'm going through withdrawals right now, but I think in hopefully a couple of days, I realize nobody really needs to talk to me. I'm going to be okay and I'll go have a chance to be more present with the people that I love and I care about and things like that. So anyway, it's kind of cool. I'm excited for it. It's painful right now, but I think it's going to be good. And I just want to recommend for you to do the same thing, to start putting up some barriers, start, start, you know, start making some rules. I remember Alex Mendoza, one of my first mentors and one of the smartest dudes, I mean, just amazing guy. I remember him telling me, I mean, probably 5 or 6 times over the last 12 years I've heard him speak about retiring your email address once a year, like kill off your email address. I've never done it. I've been so scared. And I finally am doing it. I'm finally getting out from under that pressure, like Dan Gable said. And so I can focus and I can create better and I can be better and be more and I'm excited for it. So I hope that this gives you guys permission to do that, to turn off your email, to do it. It took me a while to figure out the right way to do that. I think that way that I kind of figured out works, is really smart, I think it's working really good. Again, we're basically, vacation autoresponder messages back to them, tells them to fill out a form, form gets sent to me and I decide if I want to respond or forward it to somebody else. And it's really simple and easy to do and kind of something I recommend for you guys to test out and to try. So anyway, hope that helps. I am home with the groceries. I'm going to go in and be with my wife and my baby Nora, who's probably still awake. Everyone else better be asleep. Appreciate you guys for listening. Hope things are awesome. And if you don't have your tickets to the Funnel Hacking event yet, go and get them. It's going to be amazing. Funnelhacking.com is where you can get them at. And outside of that, appreciate you guys, and we'll talk soon.