Shut Your Email Off

Edition #26 – 3/15/2006

If you want to get stuff done…

SHUT THE EMAIL OFF!

For many of you, the mere thought of it might make you uncomfortable.

“How can I just shut it off?”
“What if I don’t receive an important announcement?”
“I need to be there for my customers.”

Look… this is coming from a marketer who makes significant income from sending emails to people like you. And I’m here to tell you:

It’s OK.

Your business will not crash and burn. Your customers will not freak out (hopefully).

I usually start my day with aspirations of accomplishing a lot. However, I too often get sucked into the whirlpool of never-ending email. Maybe you know what it’s like… The moment you finish clearing out your inbox you hit send/receive and it fills right back up again.

Before you know it, lunch time has passed, and you’re just getting around to the things you really wanted to work on.

Shut the email off.

The only way to build your business, and launch new websites, and develop new products, is to spend your time doing those things. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not telling you to abandon your email. By all means, customer service is #1. But it doesn’t have to come at the expense of never having time to develop your business.

Here’s what I often do… I check my email first thing in the morning. I reply to as many as possible as quickly as possible. I try not to get side tracked by too many marketing offers. As soon as I finish replying to that batch, I shut it down.

Most of the time, I’ll just minimize Outlook, but if I have something really important to work on, I’ll totally close the program to eliminate the temptation of taking “email breaks”.

If I’m not working on any imminent projects, I’ll check my email several times throughout the day. But if I’m working to get something done by a deadline (and I almost always have a few self-imposed deadlines impending), then I will not check my email again until right before dinner. If it’s a super important project, I won’t check it again until before bedtime.

Whatever you do, DON’T have your email program sending and receiving at automatic intervals (like every 5 minutes) and notifying you of new messages. I can’t imagine how you would get anything done!

Sure there a couple businesses I can think of where answering emails is your business, and it’s the primary way that you make income. If you’re running a support center for web hosting customers, obviously you need to see new requests as they come in. But for most businesses, it’s just not necessary. If you check your email once or twice a day, then you will be replying to most people within 12-24 hours, and in my opinion that’s good enough.

So go ahead and shut your email off… just make sure you read the ones from ME first!