Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
What I'm going to do is teach you what I call my productivity life this
one little task, this one little change in my methodology has literally saved me at least
two hours a day since I started oftentimes much much more. So here is my question, how
many of you actually when you show up to work, you're saying hi to everybody, you grab yourself
a cup of coffee your energy drink of choice whatever you do in the morning whatever your
ritual is and you sit down at your desk and you open your e-mail and check e-mail and
how do you actually do that right or worse yet how many of you once you check those e-mails
and you spent an hour or 45 minutes or however long responding to them, actually leave that
e-mail open and have it set to every 5 minutes, so when something comes in a little message
pop up in the window you're like oh, here's something from Bob that must be important,
let me check on it. I know I did the same thing so when you do that you are really working
on somebody else's agenda and you're not really taking care of your business so the problem
with that is that you start your day off in a reactive mode and when you're in a reactive
mode to start off it's really hard if not impossible to get back into being more productive
so my challenge to you is if that's what you do if that's how you operate when you get
to work in the morning, stop it immediately just stop it. If you ever look back on the
day and think I don't really feel like I got that much accomplished that day, I did. I
was a slave to my inbox it was weird because I don't like if I did respond to somebody
immediately you know like they weren't being served, or they were going to go away and
have somebody else take care of their business, and basically what I was doing without changing
my schedule and my work patterns to serve their needs now I'm a big fan of serving the
customer but nobody needs instant reaction this was a huge blow to my reality realizing
that if I don't get back to somebody for a couple of hours they're going to be okay.
Their website is not going to blow up and kill anybody I'm not a heart surgeon, it's
going to be one of those things, it's going to be okay. So what I did was I stole a page
out of a book by the name of Tim Ferris called "Four Hour Work Week" and again this is called
my productivity lifesaver, so step number 1, you're going to want to create yourself
an autoresponder message and put it on your e-mail. You've probably seen these before
you send an e-mail to somebody and it will instantly get a message that will say I'm
on vacation if you need some help contact Barbra. So that's basically what an autoresponder
is, it basically sends an e-mail out as soon as soon as something lands in somebody's inbox.What
you're going to do is you're going to create one and it will say something like thank you
very much for contacting me due to a high workload I'm currently checking e-mail twice
a day and 12PM and 4PM if you need something that is an emergency and you can't wait until
12 or 4 please feel free to call me at this number and I'll happy to serve you if not
rest assured I will check your messages and I will respond accordingly you know have a
nice day thank you for helping me with this e-mail improved proficiency blah blah blah
whatever you like that and so what happens is when somebody sends you an e-mail boom
they're going to get this messages with and it's going to say right off the bat thank
you very much I received your e-mail and tell them I'll get back to you soon so they know
when to do it. The second step is that you want to set an alarm on your clock or your
phone or both right because if you tell somebody you are going to get back to you at noon and
they're used to hearing back from you know instantly or right away they're going to get
a little bit of separation anxiety, they're going to get a little nervous when they don't
hear back from you right away sometimes people write in 2 or 3, it's actually interesting
to see how people do this, again you absolutely want to make sure you train these people to
feel comfortable with a singular message that you're going to get back to them, you're going
to take care of business it's just not going to be on their terms, it's going to be on
yours. Now the third thing that you want to do is you want you to turn off the automatic
send and receive. A lot of times people will set it so every 15 minutes it checks your
email automatically, turn that off. Actually a lot of times what I'll do is physically
shut down the e-mail program then I don't even have to worry about it. And then the
fourth step is just stick to it. My e-mail habits were habits I created over years and
years probably over a decade or so and I'll be the first to admit sometimes I fall back
into that I check my e-mail first in the morning sometimes it's 9 or 10 before I get to poke
my head out because I'm responding, I'm doing this I'm doing that, and basically what that
does is it just sets the wrong tone for the entire day. So sometimes you break that habit
and say nope, I got to do this, step 1 make sure my autoresponder is turned on. Step 2
set an alarm step number 3 turn off the automatic save and receives. Okay so again the whole
goal behind this is you will start off your day in a productive state being proactive
not reactive right so that one single's tip literally turned my productivity around and
it can help you too. }