Growing Clients

Are you swamped with emails and is your inbox becoming bigger and bigger?
A decade ago a South African consultant, Gerrit Cloete, taught me how to use MS Outlook to make my life easier and, well, to remove stress.

“How to take control of your email” was the topic of a recent post by an American consultant and author, Joel Comm.

Do you have a simple system that works? Many of my clients suffer from not having a simple system for controlling the content of their inboxes.

Perhaps you could do with three tips on how to cope?

Here they are based on my own practice as prompted by Gerrit, and bolstered by Joel.

Three tips:
•    Open two types of folders.
•    Delete as much as possible and stash the rest into these folders. I only show you my basic range of folders. Of course, I have a few more folders, as would you.
•    Use your system, go into flow and dip into your system when you are ready for a next task.

On opening my inbox I do the following:
1.    Delete: I delete whatever I can immediately. No hesitation. If it looks like a time waster, that’s good enough for me. It’s gone.

2.    @Action: I immediately put client emails and any emails requiring action into a @Action folder. I keep every item there until I have taken action. After having dealt with an item, I move the incoming email and my sent email to their specific folder.

3.    @Waiting For: I created a @Waiting For folder and whenever I dispatch an email requiring action from the recipient, I park my sent email in this folder – till I get a reply. Very handy for quickly checking who owes me a reply. Sub-tip: Where I need action, I end my email with a specific request for action so that I also know why it is in my @Waiting For folder.

4.    @Prospects: I put all emails concerning possible prospects into a @Prospect action folder.

You will note that there are only three @folders, each denoting action, concerning people. What can I do for them?

All folders 5 to 10 do not require action concerning people although the content of these folders might need some activity on my part such as reading or deleting.

5.    Newsletters: I immediately put all really interesting newsletters into this folder. I do not read them on opening my inbox. I glance at them and if I do not delete them I stash them for reading when my work for the day is done or whenever. If this folder gets too full, I delete issues from the bottom of each newsletter folder.  I limit my newsletters to 10 subscriptions. If I discover a new one to which I subscribe, I read a number of issues to ensure they are indeed interesting, and then unsubscribe an old newsletter.

6.    Clients ABC: I have a series of active client folders. My client folders in my C-drive mirror my Outlook Client folders. There is no point in using and trying to cope with two systems. I have one system in two places. If you should still use paper folders, follow the same system for paper. Note: All client folders are just for storage. Not a single item requires action. Do not file an action item as you will only create a self-induced stress situation.

7.    Associates: I have a number of associates and store correspondence with each in separate sub-folders. Note incoming mail from them or any email that requires action goes directly into my @Action folder.

8.    Family: I keep my family correspondence where I can find it and opened folders for each relative or family.

9.    Friends: Ditto

10.  Office: I put all my correspondence concerning subscriptions, software, supplies, taxes, etc., into a series of sub-folders of this folder.

Two e-mail accounts: Joel has two email accounts: One for his corporate account and the other for his personal account. Neat.

Saved e-mails: Joel does not like to delete old saved e-mails. Nor do I.  He never knows when he may need to refer back to them some point in the future. I agree, but I place all my old stuff on an external back-up drive.

Reminder e-mails: Joel keeps current e-mails in his inbox as a reminder. This, I found, is the start of building another inbox of a 1000 or more e-mails. I move current e-mails to @Action and take action – or delete from there.

Gerrit coaches other very useful practices. If you really want to do it right, and if you are in South Africa, attend one of his full-day workshops. That’s what I did. Do it before you get much older. You can gain one hour per day. And you will be less stressed. (Gerrit has an arrangement with David Allen of Getting Things Done-fame and some of you might recognise some of David’s thinking in this post.)

One last tip: If you install this system or something like it, make a huge committed effort to fully use it. Do not confuse your brain by partially trusting your spotty memory and partly trusting your new system.  Get to know your system thoroughly until you are on auto-pilot, and stash everything where it should be. Focus on the task at hand and dip into the three action folders whenever you surface.

Relax, its all there – if you placed it all there.

Albert
PS You’ll find Gerrit Gerrit at www.productivitypitstop.co.za and Joel Comm at http://joelcomm.com/how-to-control-your-email.html#comments

keywords: Controlling emails, inbox, organisation, productivity