Ep. 272: My OFS Screens My Emails

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 272. My OFS screens my email. So, email, how many emails do you get every day? 10. 100,000? 2,000 emails every day? Yeah. So email used to suck for me too, but it doesn't have to. And so for me, inbox zero is totally achievable, and I get there pretty consistently. And here's part of how so. Years ago, I decided I wasn't the only one who could get junk out of my inbox every day. I spend a bunch of time, like, archiving, just, like, looking at message subjects and getting rid of things that I know I don't have to deal with. And finally I was like, this is something everyone does. I'm not the only one. So I'm certainly not the only one who can do this for myself. It's draining and I feel unproductive while doing it. Plus, it's brain power and time that I could be using elsewhere, but instead I'm using it to filter this crap out of my email. So I started teaching an OFS on my team how to filter my email for me. And there's some things that she does and some things that she doesn't do. So, number one, she removes any spam that's obvious spam. Number two, she unsubscribes anything that comes in that's not that I've instructed her to unsubscribe from. So she knows my hobbies, things that come in that are related to my hobbies she can leave. But otherwise new things unsubscribe me from that. She writes responses to business emails that she has a good answer for, and that makes sense for her to answer. She doesn't send those emails. She saves them as a draft. So when I get up in the morning, I start going through my emails, I will see, oh, there's a draft for this one. Oh, there's a draft for that one. Oh, there's nothing for this and this and this and this. So I just have to go through these ones, right? But the ones that she knows how to do, she writes a draft for so that I can look at it and edit it, or it's obviously coming from my personal email. And so I want want to be the end say on that. She also archives and emails that I don't want to see. So this one took me a while, but I had to say, like, okay, remove these kinds of emails. Remove these Kinds of emails. Leave these kinds of emails that are related to this or this or this. Leave those in my inbox. Otherwise, archive a whole bunch of these things. And for a while, I would have to get into my inbox and start going through things. Then I would have to go to my archives and check, like, okay, did she archive anything that I actually didn't want her to archive? I need to get that back. But once we had gone through that every day for a while, I would just create like a video, a snagit video, and say, okay, these ones are actually good emails. Don't get rid of these ones. These ones I don't want to see. You can get rid of these. And it got to a point where she's really good at it. And she does it like twice a day probably. I don't even know, like, at the beginning of her working and at the end of her working, it takes her a total of like 30 minutes maybe. And it saves me, you know, I don't know, 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes. It's not very much, but it's so much. 10 minutes of time is so much. And it adds up. The more you do this, the more it adds up. And pretty soon you've saved an hour, and then you've saved a day. And this is how I work. 17 hours a week. It didn't happen overnight. It took time. And just like every other process that I've ever gotten off of my plate, it takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. But once it does happen, wow. Yeah. It never comes back to me. And it. It just saves me time forever. Just so you know, almost any VA could do this for you. As long as you trust them, they've been working for you for a little while. You know that they're not just going to run off because it is something that you have to train and you have to continuously give feedback and give information on it. But anybody can do this. It's just not that hard.