Wednesday, March 28, 2007

A Habit, An Addiction Or Both?

This month's poll question was, "When you go online, is the first thing you do most of the time?"

100% of those who voted said, "Yes."

There were also some comments.

  • "yes - it's usually the first thing that I do."

  • "Yes, email is the first thing I check when I get on my computer.Every time!!! I have a 'thing' about mail. I'm not able to drive pastmy snail mailbox either! I pick up snail mail and then check myemail!!"

  • "and then it's "which email account do I check first?"

  • "Of course, because I have to look for your mail! :)"

Of all the comments received however, Mitch had the best since he shared the secret of how your email should be read.

  • "I check it, skim it actually, but only for a message from someone who may be on my list. Everything else is put on hold until I finish my work pertaining to my sites, etc. Trying to read all that mail is a huge time waster. I think it's why many folks never make it on-line. They get distracted joining one new thing after another and never have the time to implement any of it. They kill their own success. Any mail after a couple of days should be deleted. It takes away any attempt to 'catch up' which isn't going to happen. There is no doubt, another one covering the same thing that just came in." Mitch

Now I want you to read the last comment again and this time pay close attention to the second paragraph because Mitch is right on target.

Breaking the habit of first is hard since we adopt the misconception at a very early age that we must check our mail immediately or we'll miss out on something important. As a child we ran to our parent's mailbox to get the mail in the hope that someone had sent us something.

As adults, however, you know that your mail consists of bills, advertising and occasionally a personal card or letter. You learn to collect it, sort it and fill it accordingly.

Then you go online, get an email account and revert back to your child like dream that someone is going to send you something good and you must read everything immediately. This is especially true when you get your first email account and not much email.

When you're only getting 10 or fewer emails a day it doesn't take much time to read them all and it may even give you some pleasure knowing that at least 10 people know your email address and want to send you something.

But soon hundreds of people know your email address and all of them want to send you something. Some of them may even be sending you multiple emails every day. Suddenly you realize that your inbox is filling up and you need to keep it cleaned out. Nobody wants a cluttered inbox!

At this point it's time to apply your snail mail method of checking and filing your mail to your email inbox. Like Mitch, you need to see if there's an email from a subscriber or a customer that requires an immediate response and then leave the rest of them alone until you've finished your assigned business task for the day.

To help you sort and file your email you may want to set up some folders and have your email sorted automatically. Most email readers allow you to create sub-folders and will automatically sort your incoming email.

If possible, you should create a folder just for your subscribers, customers, affiliates and jv partners. This will help you identify the email that requires an immediate response.

You may want to create 1 or more folders for some ezine mailings since the you always want to read them. (Like mine, I hope!) Others may be routed to a generic type of "read when there's time" folder since these senders only send "good stuff" occasionally.

As for the rest of your email, these can wait until you "really" have nothing else to do since you're probably just going to delete them anyway.

Once your email is sorted you must learn to only read the "really important" ones at the beginning of your work day. The "really important" ones are those from your subscribers, customers, affiliates and jv partners because they are the ones helping you with your business.

As for the rest of your email, read them according to the priority you have given the folder where it's been filed and only after you have finished your planned task.

After a few days you may find that you're getting a large backlog of email in some of your folders and unsorted email. Then, again at the end of your work day, you should spend a couple of minutes to do some massive deleting since you will never have the time to read it all. Sure you can skim the headlines and check some of it. If you find something good then keep it but I am betting that 99.99% of it will go straight to the trash.

Here are a couple of questions to help emphasize how important it is to not read all your email when you first logon.

  1. When are you the most productive, at the beginning of your workday, the middle of your workday or at the end of your workday?

  2. Of all the email you check when you first logon, how much of it was worth reading and how much went straight to the trash after you'd wasted your time checking it out?

  3. How hard is it for you to stop reading your email before you've looked at all of them?

Many find that because once they have read one they want to read another and then another and then ...

So as much as I hate to say it, if reading your email is the first thing you do when you go online, stop!

Stop with the mindless activity of reading all your email and undermining yourself and your business.

To Your Success,
Susan