Ryan Dohrn breaks down email management into three priority buckets: respond within two hours, three to six hours, or by end of day. He argues inbox zero is unrealistic and that speed matters more than folder organization for keeping clients happy and protecting your time.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here, your global sales coach. And today we're going to talk about inbox zero. Ooh, what is that? Can you imagine the day that you might get your inbox to show zero? Can you imagine if you picked up your phone and where it says messages, it said zero? Is it a reality? Can you make it happen? Ryan, help me. The answer is yeah, probably not. I'm just being honest with you. But what can you do to stay a lot more organized? One of the things that I found is that the secret does not lie in folders. The secret lies in prioritization. What I do is I break my emails in my mind down into 3 separate buckets: priority 1, priority 2, and priority 3. Priority 1 emails are emails that need to be responded to within 2 hours or less. Priority 2 are emails that can be responded to within 3 hours to 6 hours. And priority 3 are emails that should be responded to either before I go home at night or within the next 24 hours. Here's the exercise of discipline that you need to figure out, and that is first, inbox zero is probably not a reality unless you're just moving things into folders, and then that's not quite fair. The discipline is your ability to look at an email quickly and discern, is it a priority 1, priority 2, Or priority 3. That's going to be the discipline piece because someone has said to you, oh, Ryan, you're so quick to respond to my emails. That's awesome. So they made you think like you were awesome at customer service. Remember something, friends. Most clients, advertisers, etc., that you're dealing with, they don't care about your time. They care about their time. Only you can control your time. Priority 1, priority 2, priority 3. Develop a discipline in how you respond to emails. You won't get to inbox zero, but you might just find that you have greater success managing your email and not being a slave to your email or a slave to your clients. Remember, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. So we're either crazy, which is possible, or we found a career that'll feed our families for a lifetime. I'm Ryan Dohrn. Find out more about me over at my website, ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, we'll see you next time.
