#078: How to Get Your Email Under Control

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Thank you for joining me for episode 78 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent of that. As a quick reminder, you can find detailed show notes for this episode by going to b2b launcher.com forward/episode78. I have read several articles over the past couple years about this idea that email is dead or dying and that there are technologies that are going to be replacing email. In fact, there a lot of things that are replacing email according to these articles, including social media, including texting and I don't buy it. I don't buy any of it. In fact, I don't care how much texting and tweeting and Facebooking people are doing these days. Email is not going anywhere. I just can't see this technology dying anytime in the next 10 years, let's say. And you know, love it or hate it, email is still a wonderful tool. It's convenient, it's dependable. I mean, it could be a great prospecting tool for those of you who do warm mule prospecting. The trick is knowing how to keep email under control. I mean, that's really what it boils down to and that's what most of us are challenged with day in and day out. So in this episode we, we're going to address this issue head on. You're going to hear from Twyla Lapointe. And Twyla is a productivity expert and an email management consultant and she's going to share a really nice mix of, let's call it strategy, workflow and actual tools, actual technology to help you tame that email beast, if you will. You know, this is not for those of you who are like into really hardcore, like, I just want a bunch of tools and technology. There's going to be some of that. But this I think is a really good mix to solve this, this complex problem for those of us who don't really have time to learn a bunch of new things and we'd prefer just to have a better process for learning how to do that. So if that's you, I think you're going to get a lot out of this. So let's get to it.

Foreign.

Hey Twyla, welcome to the show. It's good to have you here.

Thank you. I'm really glad to be on the show with you today.

This is a very hot topic and I'm anxious to dive right in. But before we do that, I always like to ask my guests to introduce themselves, Tell us a little bit about the work you do, the clients you work with, kind of the topics that you focus on.

Yeah, absolutely. So I call myself a time management consultant. So I'm working with people. I like to say I work with people who have more money than time, although that's not always true either. One of the big things that I'm working with people on is this idea of starting somewhere other than productivity and moving towards it. So it's a little bit different than your average productivity specialist who's trying to get people to be more productive right away. I'm trying to get people to make better decisions about their time and their environment, information management, so that they can really move towards a better space in terms of their work life balance.

Interesting. So tell me a little bit more about that. In terms of time management versus productivity, how would you define them? How do you see them as being different?

Absolutely. So here's the simplest way I've found to explain it. So productivity is about being able to do things faster, and efficiency is about being able to do more things. But I would say that time management is about which things to do and when to do them. So basically what that means is if you start by being more productive and more efficient at what you do without taking the time to consider what things you're doing and how important they are, you can burn out very, very quickly by just doing more things faster, becoming a machine that continues to do more and more work. And that's actually what happened to me in my story, and that's why I came into this area, is because I was really good at doing things faster and more efficiently, but I was doing basically unlimited items or unlimited tasks, and so I just burnt out over and over again.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I talk about that a lot. And when I talk about productivity is, hey, don't just become great at whatever. Make sure that the whatever actually means something. It's important because you're not trying to create a machine, you're trying to create a better life. Right?

Absolutely. And I think that's something that people often miss in this pursuit of being a professional, of being someone who is on top of things. We sometimes don't consider exactly what we're doing next. We just look at something and think, oh, my gosh, that's important. And Then do it without comparing it to all of the other things that it's competing against.

So today we're going to talk about one aspect of all this. It's much more granular than what you just discussed here, but I think it's an important, important issue. And this is the issue of email management. Just nearly everyone I talk with is completely overwhelmed with email. I'm certainly no exception. And even though I have things that work really well for me that until I implemented them a few years ago, this was a huge, huge problem, it's still a problem. You know, the volume increases every day. So I want to kind of focus that discussion on this more tactical issue. And I know you got a lot to share there. Let's start with kind of how you view email management, because I know some of your techniques, some of your strategies are a little different.

Yeah. Well, the first thing that needs to be said about email management is that a lot of people think that reading and responding to email is managing your email. And it's not. They're really two separate processes. When you read and respond to an email, that's communicating, but when you manage an email, you're actually taking, taking the time to ensure that things are under control. So those are really two separate processes and they're not often things that we do together. And especially in a world that's increasingly about the mobile devices, because mobile devices are pretty good for the reading of email, they're not quite as good for the responding of email, and they're really bad for managing email. So those are some of the big processes that I talk about immediately with people. Is one of the biggest email management techniques is just actually managing your email. Most of us don't take any time to do that and then it snowballs on us.

So let's talk more about that. Can you give me some examples when you're talking about, okay, managing my email, conceptually that sounds great, but how do I do that? Where do I start?

Okay, well, the first thing to start with is something that I call creating time for follow up. Follow up is one of the big parts of email that we don't necessarily take the time for right away. So I have what I like to call follow up hours, which is that there's a couple of days a week where I schedule an hour to make sure that nothing is falling through the cracks, because that's one of the biggest things that happens with email. But I'd say that's something that you can do once you have a little more control. Probably the first Thing to get some control is to just actually schedule a little bit of time for the management process. So what I mean when I talk about the management process is actually related to something like triage. If you're not familiar with the word triage, it's a medical term for people on the battlefield. Medics develop strategies to make sure that you could help the people that could be helped and in the order of greatest need. And that word is actually word that a lot of people in business use. They talk about business triage. So the idea of triage is learning how to tell whether or not something is actually important and how soon it could become important. And those are the things that need to be done in an email process. So you need to be able to evaluate your email when it comes in. So the first thing that I would talk about to people is when an email comes in, first of all, should it even be reaching your eyes? Do you have any kind of filtering process in place? Have you developed a filtering process whereby things that are completely not worthy of your notice just kind of skip through? You don't have to spend any time on them at all? A lot of people spend a huge amount of time on emails that are completely irrelevant to them or not useful to their business workflow at all. So emails that need your attention, then those are emails that you need to learn how to respond to. A lot of times what happens is that people have. So let's say this is a common scenario that I run into. People read their email on their phone and then they go, well, this, this reply is too big for me to do right now. So then they don't do anything with that email at all. They just leave it there. And then three days later they're going, oh my gosh, I never replied to this email. Yeah, happens all the time. Okay, so one of the things that I talk to people that happens to. Here's the problem with email notifications. They encourage immediate half hearted reading. They don't remind you to respond, which is actually the most important part of the whole email process. And most people handle that either by forgetting about it completely, which is terrible, or responding immediately to an email they've barely read at all, which is also terrible. So this whole process is an utter waste of everyone's time. There's a couple things you can do about that. You can either stop reading emails on your phone when you're out doing things that don't encourage you to be able to respond to the email completely. A lot of people do this and they think, well, I have to pay attention to this. We get, we get trained like Pavlov's dog to answer our phones when they beep at us, but we're not actually doing any action when that happens because reading is not an action that responds to the other person in any way. Yeah, so, so what I always like to talk to people about is don't, don't waste your time reading an email that you're not going to be able to do anything about at. And specifically don't do that and then do nothing with it. So the simplest thing that you can do on your phone and a habit you can develop if you're in that space right now is just to immediately click to move that email to unread again if you haven't responded to it. The other thing that you can do is just turn off your entire notification process on your phone and have an alarm on your phone instead that allows you to check in at an interval that works for you that day. Say you know that you're going to be in a meeting for three hours and then after that meeting you're going to have about 20 minutes of time. So you could have a little alarm that comes up on your phone that you've set at that mark and say, okay, now you need to spend, you know, 15 of those minutes on email, okay. And then come back to it at that time and actually read the emails and actually respond to them in a really concise manner. And those are some of the things that you can do. Other ways to deal with your email, if you're a very mobile person, there's a few great tools online or email management, a couple specifically called Boomerang or Follow up then which will. You can tell it to bring an email back to your attention at a certain time. Those are really valuable for people who are quite busy and on the go. If you are managing things mainly from your home, which I know is true for a lot of freelancers, or from an office, those are things that are. It's much easier to just deal with them in your office and on a computer because email management is just easier on a computer. It's easier to manage on a computer than on a mobile platform.

Oh, I couldn't agree more. I personally do not use my phone as a way to respond to email unless it's something very important. So I like to have it with me because if I'm going to be away for a few hours and I know there's some stuff that might come in that's important, I'm waiting On some things or whatever, then yeah, I might respond to that. But I don't even open them if I know what they are. And this is not urgent. I'm ignoring it 100%.

And that's why I'm often telling people, turn off your phone notifications.

I didn't even know that that was an option. I must have turned that off on day one. Well, first of all, I'm not a believer in notifications in terms of beeps for my desktop email, my client or for my phone. I mean, I think that that is a, I shouldn't have assumed anything. But that to me is a no brainer, quick win that everyone can implement right now that will make a drastic difference. Right?

100%. And I'm. Most people don't. You know, one of the things that I've always done, and I know a lot of very successful people do, is you modify your programs immediately, you go into them and you say, this is what will work for me. A lot of people assume that the program is modified for your best good when you get into it. And that's almost never true. You know, when you, when you go into any kind of email program or mobile program, they're, they're made to try and reach out to you and that can be really awful in terms of work life balance. If you're allowing everything in your life to reach out and tap you on the shoulder, you're going to wear a hole in your shoulder.

Yeah, no, no kidding. That's so I think that's a huge quick win for everybody. And I, I suspect that many people just don't even think about it. We just assume that that's just the way it is. Many people don't realize that that's a, that's an option they can turn off. So I, I couldn't agree more with you. I'd like to take a step back though before we get into like really specific tactical stuff. I think there's a layer here that we need to address and I suspect a lot of listeners are in this spot right now, which is. Oh my gosh, Twilight, you have no idea. Like my inbox right now, I have 8,300 emails. So let's take that hypothetical listener right now, 8,300. They're so overwhelmed with it, they're just ignoring it. So not that they're not ignoring it. What they're doing is they're just looking at the top area of their inbox because that's the most recent and they open things and they're like Yeah, I need to think about that, how to reply. Let me do that later. And so this thing keeps building, and they're up to 8,300 emails. What would be the first, let's say two or three things you would recommend that person do. First of all, to take care of that problem, and second of all, to keep it from happening again. To have a better email management.

Absolutely. I see this all the time. You really have two options up front. You either bite the bullet and you set aside a day to go through everything with some rules, or you go nuclear, as I like to say, and you ax everything that happened after two weeks before today, and you pretend that none of that exists and you go forward, and if anything comes up later, then that's what you have to deal with. A lot of times, the vast majority of the email that is in that giant number is completely irrelevant to your life today. And that's, that's, that's the sad fact of, of being, being in this email world is that everyone is trying to reach out to you. I mean, we're all in this business as well of trying to reach out to other people. But when it's, when it's your own inbox in your own life, you need to sort of take a moment and take control. So if you choose to go nuclear on things that, you know, I've. Nobody that I've known that has done that, has had any horrible, horrible things happen, there's a big fear around doing it. But it, it's typically actually a really good decision to just decide, okay, nothing beyond these two weeks is, you know, you're going to cut out almost all the emails just from that. The other thing that you need to do is go about understanding the level of importance in your email. So you can't go at every single email as equal. This is a big thing that we tend to view every email as equal because they all look the same. When a person opens their mailbox in the physical world, they see flyers and they see letters. And we're going to put a completely different level of importance on a letter versus a flyer. Right, that makes sense. So you need to understand what in your email inbox is a flyer and what's a letter. And then you need to understand which things are letters that are, you know, are flyers masquerading as letters. And then you need to understand what the letters are. And by the time you get down to the actual important email, I would say probably about 10% of your email is vital and the rest of it is not. Something that you need to really access. One of the big tricks to this, and this is one that I do every day with my own email, when I get a lot of email, I go in, I select all emails and then I deselect what's important and I just archive the rest without even opening it. And you can often tell that by who sent it, what the subject line says. Especially if the subject line is clickbait, you can pretty much know that you don't have to click that right away. And basically what that little snippet of content, I mean most email management, most email providers have a little snippet that you can see of what actual content of the message is. And so not actually opening an important email is one of the biggest things you can do right away.

So you're saying it's either A or B. A is it's important, B it's not. And what do you, what are you doing with B? Where are you sending it with B?

I'm just archiving it. I don't even worry. Like most of the emails I'm using Gmail, so I have essentially unlimited space. Sometimes I'll do the difference between deleting something and archiving it, but most of the time I just archive it all and I might come back to it later if I have any time. But I mean, I never have extra time for that stuff. So I don't recommend doing this with emails from your mom. But you need to be careful that you are only addressing things that are of importance. So you need to kind of make that a B decision. And A could be any level of importance from need to deal with in two weeks to need to deal with today. At that point, that's just kind of the first cut you need to make when you're dealing with an enormous amount of email. Especially when you're getting email, if you're getting, let's say more than 50 to 80 emails a day, that's a huge cut you need to make the moment you get into your inbox.

So it sounds to me like the criteria then it's not so much it is important, but it sounds to me like it's more about action. Okay, these are things I need to take action on and these are things that do not.

Yes. And just remember that that action could spread from now to a month from now on occasion. So some of those things are I eventually need to deal with this. And some of those things are I need to deal with it right now. So that's where it is, an action based thing. Though you're right. It's importance. And basically an email, anything that's important is going to be something actionable. We use email to get things done. That's the main purpose of the whole idea. We use phone calls to communicate lots of information. We use email to get things done. I think that's a big thing that people. People miss. So email is something where you want to be able to communicate information quickly for the purpose of it being actionable.

Yeah, because some of it may not be. I think when people think action, they have to respond. Some things you don't have to respond to, like, let's say, a newsletter that you really enjoy. Well, yeah, I don't need to respond to it, but there's an action item in that. I want to read it.

Yes.

So that could be an A. So it's not necessarily respond. It could be study, read, skim, whatever, but it's not going to go into the B pile, which is basically ignore.

Yeah, absolutely. And people spend a lot of time. One of the biggest things I find is that people open every single email, even if they already know. They're just. They're kind of. We've trained ourselves that when you get an email, you open it, Right?

Yeah.

But if you already know that you're not going to use that information, if you already know that it's not working for you, it's not giving you anything and you're not able to respond to it, there is no point in opening that email at all.

It should just go, okay, so I've done two things so far. Going back to our hypothetical situation. I want to. I went nuclear. I thought about it in Twilight. You know what I said? You thought you were crazy at first. But I thought that I could actually pare that down significantly in three days. I spent two days already and I'm down to 6,500. I'm giving up. I'm going nuclear. My inbox is clear. A new day comes, right? And Now I got 55 emails in my inbox. Now I'm starting to practice the A and B. Right. Okay. But, you know, here's what. Here's what starts happening. Day two, I get another 60 emails. My inbox was down to 10 because those are my A's. Now when I separate them again, my inbox is now up to 20 because there's another 10 action emails there. So it starts building up again. So where do you go from here?

So from there the biggest thing that you need to do is. So from there the biggest thing that you need to do is, is rate things by importance. So remember that you are also important. So that does not necessarily mean that your newsletter that you find very, very engaging is something you shouldn't be reading. This is something that happens a lot. People ask anything that's, that's personal and then they get exhausted because they're not dealing with their own needs as well. So I'm just going to throw that in there really quick when you this idea of triage. So if you're looking at an actual medical triage situation, you might have three patients and there'll be one that you have to have like a six hour surgery or he'll die in 20 minutes. And you have one person that is, that needs to have some care on one of their wounds within 15 minutes or they'll die in three hours. So those two situations, if you visualize them, you have to deal with the person that has the small amount of care first, even though the other person is worse. And this is something that I feel doesn't happen very well in business. People go, oh my gosh, that's dying. And they dive into it and they've missed this, you know, three or four very small things they could do that would make everything better for the long term. And so that's one of the big keys to what, how do you decide what to do with these emails you now have? So the rule that they often toss around, and I think for most people this works very well, is if you can do it within two to five minutes, just do it. So if you get an email in from someone and they are saying, you know, and this happens all the time, an email just being like just emailing you to confirm our appointment at this time on Wednesday. If you get that email, don't just leave it there for two days. That email is one that you click into say yes, looking forward to see you send, then archive it, do not leave it in your inbox. These are things like not archiving is one of the biggest problems. Or not putting things into folders or not archiving them is one of the biggest problems I come across is that people just leave everything in their inbox. And it's like putting all of your, putting your breakfast, you're putting your lunch sandwich in the middle of a pile of garbage and then trying to find it.

Yeah, because right now, so far you've given great advice as to how to drastically minimize what goes in your inbox. But as the example I gave you earlier, then you're down to 10. But the next day there's 10 more A items and before you know it, a week's gone by. You got over 100 emails that are, let's say, action emails or emails or whatever you want to call them.

Yes.

And you haven't responded to too many of them because you're now overwhelmed because they're all important.

Yeah. And so that's what I'm saying. Some of it has to be what is going to take the least time to deal with and take those out of the inbox. Then what is going to take the most time to deal with. You can also take those out of the inbox and put them into. Into whatever you use for notes. So I use Evernote for that, where I'll send that email to Evernote and I'll start developing what I need to do. I'll make it. I'll make it a time based. So if anyone's familiar with this idea of smart goals, which is it's very important that your goals or your things that need to happen have a particular deadline. And to some extent, when you're very busy, those can even be a little bit arbitrary as long as you have something to aim towards. Most people do not function well on. I'll do that eventually.

So give me an example. Let's talk through an example of how you would use Evernote on something that you need to work on that you want to kind of take out of the inbox, but it's going to require outside work.

Absolutely. So Evernote has a feature where they give you a custom email address that if you email something to that address, it will go into your Evernote, into your default folder. Okay. So if you have that email on your speed dial and you come to an email and it's about important that your goals or your things that need to happen have a particular deadline, an enormous project that you're going to be working on for the next three weeks, and you know that this is just information you'll need for that project and that you won't need to to some extent, when you're very busy. Those can even be a little bit arbitrary. As long as you have something to aim towards. Most people do not function well on. I'll do that eventually.

So give me an example. Let's talk through an example of how.

You, like respond at length to the person about it. This is something that happens all the time. You respond to the person, be like, thank you, I got your information. Just really brief, very polite, but brief. Then you forward that email to your Evernote and then in the subject line you can add a tag that relates it to the project. So that information is now stored somewhere other than your inbox. Because inbox is not a place to store information, it's a place to correspond. So when you have information that needs to be stored somewhere. That's why to me, Evernote and email are a pair that I can't unpair.

You would use Evernote on something that you need to work on that you want to kind of take out of the inbox.

I need to have a place to store that information that's not my inbox.

But it's going to require outside work.

Absolutely. So Evernote has a feature where they give you a custom email address that if you email something to that address, it will go into your Evernote, into your default folder. Okay, so if you.

And yeah, so let's say that this was. You landed a new project with a client, they sent you some background information to go over. It's kind of the first step. And you send it to Evernote to that project folder.

Yeah, absolutely. And then the next thing you'd want to do is make. Make a way for yourself to know when that information needs to be used. So for me, I might do that in Evernote by creating something that brings it back to me on a certain. Or I might put it into sort of my long term to do list and be like, okay, on this day I need to do it. Have that email on your speed dial. And you come to an email and it's about an enormous project that you're gonna be working on for the next three weeks. And you know that this, if it's a really big project deadline, I have a calendar on my Google Calendar called Deadlines Calendar is just information you'll need for that project and that you won't need to like respond at length to the person about it. This is something that happens all the time. And so I'll just put it like by this day I need to have done this thing in that calendar. So for example, it'd be like review project information for such and such account. And I'll just put that in the calendar so that it's now a time based deadline. Where I'm saying this is where I need to have looked at this information by Gotcha.

So you got it out of your inbox, you moved it to Evernote, which is a great, great archiving system. And then you have a time component or alert component that's going to trigger that to make sure it doesn't just.

You respond to the person, be like, thank you, I got your information. Just really brief. Very polite, but brief. Then you forward that email to your Evernote and then in the subject line you can add a tag that relates.

It to stay there.

Exactly. And if you miss any one of those things, you get into trouble. So if you the project so that information is now stored somewhere other than you miss storing the information where it's easily accessible, then you get into trouble because you have to go back and hunt for it when you get to the deadlines. If you miss the time component, then it could get lost in the sands of time. And a month later you realize, oh my gosh, I never got back to this person and I've just lost a client because I'm way too late.

Gotcha. Okay, so, all right, so those are any other ideas for kind of getting stuff out of the inbox you mentioned. Hey, quick replies, you know, in terms of triaging.

Yeah, quick replies. As long as you're archiving or getting rid of the email address.

Yeah, get them out of there inbox.

Because inbox is not a place to store information, it's a place to correspond. So when you have information that needs to be stored somewhere.

What about the constant. Oh, let me look at this again. What was it? Oh, this is an email from twice.

To me, Evernote and email are a pair that I can't unpair because I need to have a place to store that information that's not in my inbox.

I need to think about that a little more. And you leave it in your inbox. I know a lot of people do that. I know I'm guilty of that.

It's huge. There are a lot of services that you can use to help you with that. There's at least three or four that I know of that are really popular. So Boomerang, follow up. Then I use Streak for Gmail and Chrome. That's pretty full featured for customer management software as well. But those are all options that allow you to have an automatic process to bring emails back to you.

So Boomerang, you mentioned Streak.

Yes.

So let's say that this was. You landed a new project with a client, they sent you some background information to go over is kind of the first step.

Streak, Boomerang and follow up. Then those are three of the main.

Ones and you send it to Evernote to that project folder.

Yep, absolutely. And then the next thing you'd want to do is make a way for yourself to know when that information follow up. Then specifically you can use with any email program at all. So that would be great for people who are using Outlook specifically. Boomerang I think works best with Gmail, but you can use it for Outlook as well. Streak is, is like I said for Gmail when you're using Chrome browser. So those are all kind of different options. What all of them do though, or the big functionality that's extremely important is taking things out of your inbox and bringing them back at a specified time. This is the number one email management tool that I think most freelancers or most people in need to be used. So for me, I might do that in Evernote by creating something that brings it back to me on a certain day. Or I might put it into. In the situation of having a lot of email out of my long term to do list and be like, okay, on this day I need to do it. If it's a really big project deadline, I have a calendar on my Google Calendar called Deadlines Calendar between clients and themselves would really need to use. So what happens when you're using these kind of programs is that you. I call them apps, let's say. So when you use these apps to bring email back to you instead of keeping it in your inbox so you read something and you say, I'm going to deal with this Monday because that's my specified time that I am not in meetings and I have time to deal with this. So then you tell that email and so I'll just put like by this day I need to have done this thing in that calendar through one of these programs. Go away and come back to me on Monday at 800. So for example, it'd be like review project information for am. This is also a great way to deal with such and such account. And I'll just put that in the calendar so that it's now a time based deadline where I'm saying this is where I need anything that is kind of a miscellaneous time where there's no specific time it needs to be done. It just needs to be done. I have what I call hour every Monday morning, which is that I have a whole bunch of emails that I've used my program to send back to me at 8am on Monday. And so I get like 40 emails back in my inbox 8am Monday morning, which is the time I've specifically set aside to deal with them. Have looked at this information by Gotcha.

So you got it out of your inbox, you moved it to Evernote. You know, I like that a lot Twilight. And here's why. My next question is going to Be this cell, which is great, great archiving system. And then you have a. Sounds great. But my problem with this approach in the past has been, oh, okay, time component or alert component that's going to trigger that to make sure it doesn't just stay there.

Exactly. And if you miss any one of those things, you get into trouble.

So if you send this back to me on Thursday or send this back to me next Monday or send in and it comes back to me at the worst time, this is not going to work right now. What am I doing? So it works for about a day and then when these boomerangs start coming back to you, you're overwhelmed. But I love the idea of send it back to me on Monday at 8, which is the time you have allotted, let's say 8 to 10 to do this kind of stuff. And that way you can batch it.

You miss storing the information where it's easily accessible, then you get into trouble.

Because get it done.

Absolutely. Having a specific time that you're saying this is my time to manage email, which is also responding and responding to. You have to go back and hunt for it when you get to the deadlines, if you miss the time component email. So you're like, this is. This is that time and, and you can't compromise on that time and you then it could get lost in the sands of time. And a month later you realize, oh my gosh, I never got back to this person and I've just lost a client because I'm way too late. Especially can't compromise on that time two weeks in a row because then you're hooped. That's the biggest thing is that there is discipline involved in making this happen. You need to set aside a time. It doesn't have to be Monday at 8, although I find that that's a very good time because most people, that is the day that they make sure that their email is happening. I found that if I want to get a response from someone, if I want something to happen.

Gotcha. Okay, so, all right, so those are any other ideas for kind of getting.

Stuff out earlier in the week is a whole lot better than later. And we all know why that is.

Yeah, yeah.

By the end of the week, it's crazy. If you want to get on someone's to do list Monday, you know, by.

The inbox you mentioned, hey, quick replies. You know, in terms of triaging Monday.

Between 8 and 10 is the time to get there.

So I want to talk before we're going to start wrapping up.

Quick replies as long as you're archiving or getting rid of the email address.

Yeah, get them out of there. What about the, what about the constant. Oh, let me look at this again. What was it? Oh, this is an email from Twice. But I love where we're going with this in terms of. Let's talk more about workflow. What other ideas can you give us? You mentioned one here, which is, hey, designated time for follow up in terms of daily and weekly workflow. Any other ideas you can share that make this more of a sane process?

Absolutely. A little bit of scheduled time at 1, Bella.

Yeah, I need to think about that a little more. And you leave it in your inbox. I know a lot of people do that. I know, I'm guilty of that.

It's huge. There are a lot of services that you can do point in the day, whether it's the beginning or the end of the day. Every day for email, where you take that time to respond to people, is a really great idea used to help you with that. There's at least three or four that I know of that are really popular. So Boomerang follow up then. I use Streak for Gmail, but you don't. If it starts becoming huge, you're doing something else wrong. Right. Those kind of times a day it should be 20 to 30 minutes. But if you're not actually making sure that you, you get rid of emails that are not useful to you, that's another thing. The other thing too is, I would say it's a little bit cerebral, but the idea that if you say yes to everybody, you're going to have way too much mail. In Chrome, that's pretty full featured for customer management software as well. But those are all options that allow you to have an automatic process to bring emails back to you.

So Boomerang, you mentioned Streak.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest things. So if your answer to every email is yes, I Streak, Boomerang and follow up, then those are three of the main ones. I can do that for you or absolutely, you darn well better be getting paid for it. And you know, don't let email eat the time that you're getting paid for. Especially as a freelancer, if you're getting paid billable hours for doing any of that, don't let email eat that time. And the way that you do that is by making sure that you are saying no to some things, that you are letting some things go. Like if you go through that process, follow up, then specifically you can use with any email program at all. So that would be great for people who are using Outlook specifically. Boomerang says I was talking about of going through email inbox and sorting out things. I think works best with Gmail, but you can use it for Outlook as well. Streak is like I said for Gmail when you're using Chrome browser. So those are all kind of different options. If you keep unchecking everything and not and not letting it go, you're going to end up with way too much. The other thing too is that at some point it might be wise to have someone as an assistant or to have, you know, their, their personal virtual assistants that you can get if you're at a at a specific time of overlo. It doesn't necessarily have to be a very long term commitment to get an assistant either. Sometimes with freelancing you're going to have overload that happens at certain what all of them do though or the big functionality that's extremely important is taking certain seasonal times and planning to have someone to help you with some of that or to sort some of that for you things out of your inbox and bringing them back at a specified time. This is the number one email management tool that I think most freelancers or most people might be wise. So those are some of the other ideas that I have. In the situation of having a lot of email, I think the biggest action item that people can do is just the setting aside the time to manage the email and understanding that you have to set aside both responding to email time and managing email time because they're not exactly the same process and they both need some time to happen. But the time invest in those things is going to come back to you tenfold.

Yeah, I call it processing. So to me, moving things around out of my inbox and putting them in.

The between clients and themselves would really need to use. So what happens when you're using these kind of programs is that you. I call them apps, let's say. So when you use these apps to bring email back to you right place.

To me that's processing time and that's usually a very fast task instead of.

Keeping it in your inbox.

So you read this and one thing I'll mention two things that have worked really well for me from a workflow standpoint. One is to not check email throughout the day, all day long. Of course, you know, I've already turned off notifications, but I try to just check email at certain times during a day. It's not always the same time. I noticed that I really go to town on my email when I haven't checked it for a few hours because suddenly my inbox is full. And it's like that feeling when you come back from vacation and you have.

Something and you say, I'm going to deal with this Monday because that's my specified time that I am not in meetings and I have time to deal with this. So then you tell that email 500.

Emails, you're a lot more.

You're brutal with your email through one of these programs. Go away and come back to me on Monday at 8am this is also a great way to deal with any.

Because you want to get it down to a manageable size. I find that when I suddenly get that many in my inbox at once because it's been a few hours, I'm a better manager and a better processor of the email. And I'm better at. Okay, this is definitely not an A. Whereas if you check every two minutes, you're gonna think too much about is this an A or a B. You know the other thing too, I don't know who taught me this like, look, especially with emails where people ask you like a million questions in an email or they talk about all these things and it's like 10 paragraphs. You don't have to respond with an email the same size.

Absolutely. Thing that is kind of a miscellaneous time where there's no specific time it needs to be done. You know, don't, don't model the behavior you want. Just needs to be done. I have what I call follow up hour every Monday morning, which is that I, I have a whole bunch of emails that I've used my program to send back to me at 8am on Monday. And so I get like 40 emails back in the inbox.

Yeah. What's like the biggest thing about, what's the biggest purpose of the email? Well, it really is to ask me about this. Well, can I reply to this? And you know, maybe you can say, listen regarding the other stuff, you know, let's talk about that. Yeah, sometimes it's easier to take it to a conversation.

Oh, 100%. And people need to know when to escalate an email to a phone call. So some of those things are if things are muddy or unclear. Phone call. You can't unmutty things in email. You really can't. It takes you a very long time to write an email that takes 8am Monday morning, which is the time I've specifically set aside to deal with them.

You know, I like that a lot, Twilight. And here's why My next question is going to be, this all sounds great, but my, my problem with this approach in the past has been, oh, okay.

It just doesn't work.

I'm with you.

And the other thing too is send.

This back to me on Thursday or send this back to me next Monday or so in.

And it comes back when, when you're trying to communicate. This is something specifically for the ladies listening here too. If, and you know what, for the gentleman as well, if you're trying to communicate anything that has any emotional investment or element, phone calls are better. And what I mean is, if someone is upset with you, don't email them 30 times. It will not help. Right. If someone is unclear and insecure, talking to them on the phone will be a million times better than email. If you can sense insecurity in a.

Client to me, at the worst time, this is not gonna work right now. What am I doing? So it works for about a day and then when these boomerangs start coming back to you, you're overwhelmed. But I love the idea of send it back to me on Monday at 8, which is the time call them.

Do not try to address insecurity via email. It's a disaster.

You have allotted, let's say 8 to 10 to do this kind of stuff and that way you can batch it.

And it takes so much time.

I couldn't agree more. And I know that a lot of freelancers are, they don't like going on the phone, but man, it's key. It's so key. It'll make the difference between landing the client and not landing client or avoiding a misunderstanding that could cost you the client. I mean, just so many things.

Absolutely. And it's, it's. I mean, if you have something that is that powerful, use it. You know, email is powerful for giving people information and get it done. Absolutely. Having a specific time that you're saying this is my time to manage email, which is also responding and responding to email. So you're like, this is. This is that time. And you can't compromise on that time. And you especially can't compromise on that time two weeks in a row because then you're hooped. That's straight information. But as soon as you have any emotional or psychological element, you want to go straight to a phone call.

This has been very practical, Twyla. So thank you so much for spending your time with us. Before we sign off though, love to hear where people can learn more about you. Where can I send them? I know you got some great resources out there.

Absolutely. I have quite a few resources on my website, so I have online classes that are paid and I have some, what I call lifelines, which are free resources. They'll talk a little bit more about about smart goals, which I kind of mentioned a little bit going in here and some other things like that. If you that's the biggest thing is that there's there is discipline involved in making this happen. You need to set aside a time. It doesn't have to be Monday at 8, although I find that that's very, a very good time because most people that is the day that they make sure that their email is happening. You know, I found that if I want to get a response from someone, if I want something to happen, just go to lastresortcourses.com you can click through to any of those things easily.

Awesome. Thanks again. This has been a very practical chat and I've learned a lot myself.

Oh, wonderful. I'm glad to hear that.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this session. I hope you walked away with some good ideas you can implement quickly. And I wanted to remind you that you can grab the details show notes for this episode@b2b. Launcher.com earlier in the week is a.

Whole lot better than later and we all know why that is.

Yeah, yeah.

By the end of the week it's crazy. If you want to get on someone's.

To do list Monday, you know, episode 78. So if you're out of the office somewhere where you couldn't take notes, Monday.

Between 8 and 10 is the time to get there.

So I want to talk before we're going to start wrapping up, but I love where we're going with this in terms of let's talk more about workflow. You want to reference any of the tools, we discuss any of the ideas. You have a handy place you can go back to and reference. And if you enjoyed this episode, why not share with a colleague, someone you think who would get some benefit from it Made it really easy by including a lot of sharing buttons there on the Show Notes page you can use via social media. You can email directly from there and I'd really appreciate that. That's how really upgrown the the listener base for the show has been through word of mouth. So I truly appreciate all you guys who have been doing that, who've been sharing it with friends and colleagues. Means a lot. What other ideas can you give us? You get you mentioned one here, which is a designated time for follow up in terms of daily and weekly workflow. Any other ideas you can share that, make this more of a sane process to me. So that brings us to the end of the episode. I am your host, Ed Gandia.

Absolutely. A little bit of scheduled time at 1.

Thank you so much for listening and I hope you have an awesome day. The High Income Business Writing Podcast is.

A production of B2B business launcher.

Learn more at B2B launcher.com.

Point in the day, whether it's the beginning or the end of the day, every day for email, where you take that time to, to respond to people is a really great idea. But you don't, if it starts becoming huge, you're doing something else wrong. Right. Those kind of times a day, it should be 20 to 30 minutes. But if you're not actually making sure that you, you get rid of emails that are not useful to you, that's another thing. The other thing too is, is, I would say it's a little bit cerebral, but the idea that if you say yes to everybody, you're going to have way too much. Yeah, you know that that's one of the biggest things. So if, if your answer to every email is, yes, I can do that for you, or absolutely, you darn well better be getting paid for it. And you know, don't, don't let email eat the time that you're getting paid for. Especially as a freelancer, if you're getting paid billable hours for doing any of that, don't let email eat that time. And the way that you do that is by making sure that you are saying no to some things, that you are letting some things go. Like if you go through that process I was talking about of going through email inbox and sorting out things, if you keep unchecking everything and not letting it go, you're going to end up with way too much. The other thing too is that at some point it might be wise to have someone as an assistant or to have, you know, there, there are personal virtual assistants that you can get if you're at a, at a specific time of overload. It doesn't necessarily have to be a very long term commitment to get an assistant either. Sometimes with freelancing, you're going to have overload that happens at certain seasonal times and planning to have someone to help you with some of that or to sort some of that for you might be wise. So those are some of the other ideas that I have. I think the biggest action item that people can do is just the setting aside the time to manage the email and understanding that you have to set aside Both responding to email time and managing email time, because they're not exactly the same process and they both need some time to happen. But the time you invest in those things is going to come back to you tenfold.

Yeah. I call it processing. So to me, moving things around out of my inbox and putting them in the right place, to me, that's processing time, and that's usually a very fast task.

Yes.

And one thing I'll mention two things that have worked really well for me from a workflow standpoint. One is to not check email throughout the day, all day long. Of course, you know, I've already turned off notifications, but I try to just check email at certain times during a day. It's not always the same time. I notice that I really go to town on my email when I haven't checked it for a few hours because suddenly my inbox is full. And it's like that feeling when you come back from vacation and you have 500 emails. You're a lot more. You're brutal with your email.

Yeah.

Because you want to get it down to a manageable size. So I find that when I suddenly get that many in my inbox at once, because it's been a few hours, I'm a better manager and a better processor of the email. And I'm better at. Okay, this is definitely not an ad. Whereas if you check every two minutes, you're gonna think too much about, is this an A or a B? You know the other thing, too, I don't know who taught me this, like, look, especially with emails where people ask you like a million questions in an email or they talk about all these things and it's like 10 paragraphs. You don't have to respond with an email the same size.

Absolutely not. That's a huge thing. Don't. Don't model the behavior you want.

What's, like, the biggest thing about. What's the biggest purpose of the email? Well, it really is to ask me about this. Well, can I reply to this? And, you know, maybe you could say, listen, regarding the other stuff. You know, let's talk about that.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's easier to take it to a conversation.

Oh, 100%. And people need to know when to escalate an email to a phone call. So some of those things are. If things are muddy or unclear. Phone call. You can't unmuddy things in email. You really can't.