MBA1410 Q&A Wednesday: How do I stay on top of my email with everything else I need to do?

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform.

Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits bring. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey oh welcome to the $1 RBA Show. The business answers you're looking for every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a company business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net and we'll answer it right here on the show on Q and A Wednesday. Today's question is from Vivian and Vivian asks how do I stay on top of my email with everything else I need to do? Totally understand Vivian as an entrepreneur, as a founder, you have a full plate, you got lots to do every day. Your to do list is a mile long. An email just makes you feel even overwhelmed because you know it's time bound. You get an email and you feel guilty, haven't replied the same day and then another day goes by and another days go by and in a lot of ways it's causing a lot of mental and emotional stress in your business and we want to alleviate that right now. And I'm going to share with you some strategies to do that, how you can get a handle on your email immediately to help yourself out. All right, let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So in today's Q and A, Wednesday's episode, Vivian asks, how do I stay on top of my email with everything else I need to do in my business? Super overwhelming. Totally get it. But we're going to attack this straight on and make sure you have a handle on your email and not have that feeling of guilt and overwhelm and I'm falling behind and all that kind of stuff. The first thing is you control your inbox, not the other way around. Okay? So if you're getting emails and you're getting a flood of messages that you can't handle, the easiest thing you could do right now to help you with that anxiety is to set up expectations for your actual people that are sending emails to you, to your audience. So, for example, when somebody sends you an email, they're most likely looking to get a response either the same day or the day after. And you often feel guilty that you're not getting back to them in that timeframe. Well, you can set up expectations by easily having a vacation responder or a autoresponder. This is built in into Gmail or any kind of email application where an email gets sent immediately after somebody sends you an email. And usually people use this for when they're on vacation. So they get an email that says, hey, I'm away, or I can't get to your email right now. I'm a little tied up. I'll get back to you in three days. And this is usually used when people go on holiday on vacation. And then we'll just let them know that, hey, I'm not working right now. But you can set this up permanently and just say, hey, I only check my email a few times a week, so my reply will be delayed. I will get back to you. Thanks for your patience. And this buys you some time and doesn't stress you out, gives you a little bit more time to catch up on email and also take care of your business. This is something you could do immediately and help you out. The next thing I want you to consider is outsourcing your inbox. What does that mean? That means that there's a ton of email. I would say more than 50% of most people's inbox is filled with email that they don't need to read and they don't need to reply to themselves. Hiring an executive assistant, a virtual assistant, is One of the best investments you can make for your sanity and for your business. You can hire people for $500 a month part time over in the Philippines. Great people that can really help you out. Fantastic language skills. Of course you got to interview them and make sure that they're great, qualified, experienced candidates. But the point here is that there's a lot of emails you're going to get that you don't need to answer. So they can archive those emails for you, they can move them to folders, they can reply to emails that are ask things like, hey, you're going to be on our podcast, we need your image, your photo, you know, your logos, whatever, and your EA can take care of that for you. They have a folder that has all that stuff for them and they can reply on your behalf, hey, I'm Omar's assistant. Here is the information you're looking for. They want to book some time with you, all that kind of stuff. And EA can take care of that. So about 70% of your emails can be taken care of. I said 50% earlier, but I meant 50% of them. You don't need to even touch. You just need to kind of put it in an archive or put it away or it's just like newsletters you're a part of. But the emails you need to reply to, a lot of them can be replied. I would say about 20% can be replied. At least 20% by an EA. That means 70% of email is all taken care of. The other thing is your EA can buy you some time. If you need to reply, your EA can get back to you, say, hey, there are five messages in your inbox and a quick brief. This person wants this, this person wants this, this person wants this. How do you to reply? Or would you like to reply yourself? And you can just quickly, you know, do a voice memo or a quick message on your phone. This is what I want you to reply with or I will get on a phone call with them, send them my calendar invite and the EA can reply on their behalf with very minimal intervention from you. Or you can jump in and reply and deal with the last 30%. Outsource your inbox as much as possible. This is going to save you so much headaches and time. So tip number two, after you know, tip number one, which is the autoresponder, the vacation mode is to outsource your inbox. Get somebody to handle the vast majority of the messages that you're getting. Next block book time to deal with your inbox. Don't have your inbox open all the time. Don't check your phone constantly for emails. Block book. 30 minutes in the morning if you want, or 30 minutes at the end of the day when you're kind of tired and brain dead from all the, you know, big rocks and big work you've been doing on your business. To handle your inbox, go through all the messages you have to. 30 minutes is just an arbitrary number. You know, it could be more or less up to you, but by just setting aside some time, you can zone in, get it done, and don't go back to it. Because by going back and forth in your inbox, looking at emails, opening them up and then starring them and all that stuff, you're wasting a lot of time. Mental energy, content switching. So you don't want to do that to yourself. What you want to do is only go in your inbox when you're ready to reply, go in hard 30 minutes, get done and get out. And then anything you didn't finish, go back to it tomorrow. Remember, you're buying yourself time through an EA or through the autoresponder. And that really helps because it's like you're done with it and you don't have to look about it. Look at it again, you know you'll be back tomorrow. The next tip is really a mindset tip because it allows you to prioritize email in the right place. Email, by nature, is basically people wanting things from you want to take time from you, want to take your attention. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes that's business, sometimes that's clients. But understand that emails, in the grand scheme of things in your business, it's not a big rock. I say big rock like a big project, a thing that's really going to move the needle in your business more like a sander, at most a pebble. And what you want to do here is make sure that you do your big rocks first. You do the big things that move your business. The big projects, the big initiatives, the big hires, all that kind of stuff that really contribute majorly to your goals. And then you deal with email later when you're gassed out and you're tired. And by having this perspective, you understand, hey, email is, you know, something I gotta deal with. But it's not the most important thing in my life or business. A lot of us, we put the same importance on everything. We say email is just as important as booking a client worth $500,000 on a sales call. No, it's not the same okay, it is important, but not as important as the things that are really gonna push your business forward. The next tip that I want to share that I think is super helpful that I've been using the last couple years is dictating your replies. I find that answering email on my phone is so much faster and it's just so much easier because I can definitely talk faster than I can type. And as long as I'm enunciating and I'm clear, it's pretty accurate on my iPhone. So I press that dictating app and I just say my reply and it literally sounds like, hey, John comma, new line, new line. Thank you so much for your email. Let's jump on a call sometime soon, period. My calendar link is. Get the point. So I just literally dictate it and it's so much faster. I look at it, I review it, make sure that, you know, there's no typos. I may have to do a quick change or two, but it's a lot faster than typing. I hit send. Done deal. By the way, you could do this on your desktop too. You can actually dictate on your desktop and write those things out. I say desktop, but also your laptop. Every computer has a different shortcut for that, whether it's a Mac or a PC.

Strayer University we help students like you go from is it possible? To anything is possible by offering access to up to 10 no cost gen Ed courses so you can reach your goals affordably and fast. Visit Strayer Edu to learn more. No cost Gen EDS provided by Strayer University Affiliate sofia. Eligibility rules apply. Connect with us for details. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and has many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.

To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's episode, Vivian, I hope I helped you with my tips. When it comes to getting a handle on your email while handling everything else in your business, there's so much you can do to just minimize the pressure as well as outsource most of the work. Bulk of the work time is not money. Time is more valuable than money. So if you can get somebody to help you out, save you that time, you're going to feel so much better. And in the meantime, if you can't get somebody right now, put into place all the other things I mentioned. The vacation reminder, the vacation responder, allotting a certain time, a fixed amount of time every day or every other day to deal with email dictating your emails and more. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 for your question. Vivian. If you have a question you want to ask, I can answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Just email me over at Omar MBA Net. If you love the show, please share it with your friends on social media right now. Do it right now. Do me a favor and screenshot what you're listening to right now and send it on social, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on whatever you use and hashtag 100mba. I'd love to see the love before I go. I want to leave you with this. If you don't time bound the time you are inside your inbox and weeding through email, you can be lost in there forever. Right? You can go on and on reading emails and promotions and newsletters, but when you have a certain amount of time, 30 minutes, you know that's not important. I can't read that right now. This is more important. Let me go on and do that. Let me quicken up my reply. Let me be more efficient with my replies. You get the point. Time is a great constrictor. It allows you to make sure that you are abiding by that time and, you know, prioritizing your time for other things. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

It's tax season and at LifeLock we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, will fix it, guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com special offer for the threats you can't control. Terms apply.