Email Is Not Your Friend

14.03.2017 | 0

Episode #1 of the course Hacking your inbox for maximum productivity by Wil Schroter

In this chapter: Three goals that our email hacks should help you achieve

Email is not your friend.

Email is like your obnoxious neighbor Chad who enjoys playing the bagpipes early Sunday morning. Except email is worse, because on top of being kinda annoying, your email is cleverly disguised as a productivity-enhancing super-buddy. It slowly drains you of all your time, focus, and output by constantly distracting you with other people’s demands, no matter how ridiculous they may be.

You want to spend time with your spouse, your kids, your dog, your best friend, your animatronic clown—but no, you’re spending time with email.

When you woke up this morning and checked your inbox, did email tell you that it had saved you a bunch of time and you had the day off? Did email do your work for you?

No!

Email asked if you’d be interested in buying a bunch of crap you don’t want. Email made you attend a meeting with that annoying biz dev guy Ted. Email added 50 things to your task list that you may not ever even need to finish.

Did email invite you to a cool party that turned into an ‘80s movie? No, email most certainly did not. Because email is not your friend.

Taming the Beast

You don’t have to live like this, and we can show you how to change it.

We can show you how to build the tools and systems to make email work for you. We can save you an incredible amount of time if you’re willing to just switch up some of the typical stuff you’ve grown accustomed to.

We Have Three Goals for Our Email Hacks:

1. Spend as little time in email as possible. We’re going to employ every possible weapon to decrease the amount of email we need to pay attention to, which will leave us more time to be productive and even give us some of our personal life back (yay!).

2. Appear incredibly responsive all the time. We’re not going to ignore email—quite the opposite. We’re going to look like we’re monitoring and responding to it all day and night. Spoiler alert, we’re actually going to spend far less time on it, so look at that—the joke’s on everyone else!

3. Destroy all the time-sucking aspects of email. Email drains our time because we don’t process it properly. We’re going to learn to process it like <insert funny reference> so that we’re only spending time on critical stuff.

All of these goals can be achieved by using a combination of hacks to streamline your workflow.

** Our Self-Conscious Disclaimer **
While we make lots of references to using a virtual assistant, it’s not just because we want you to use our virtual assistants (although you totally should). Many of these tactics can be employed without the use of an assistant or can be used with your existing soon-to-be-replaced-by-Zirtual assistant ;) Changing your process is what’s important here. How you get it done is up to you.

Key Takeaway

Follow our email tips and hacks and it’s sure to make your day more enjoyable and your inbox more manageable.

Share with friends