If so, it’s time to organise your email system before it takes over your life!
Email is an extremely convenient mode of communication; perhaps too easy, as it seems to invite people to contact
you for sometimes barely any reason at all. With all that email coming in needing attention, it can be hard to get anything else done. So how can you get a grip on your business emails before it gets its grip on you?
Gaining Control Of Email
Success in small business relies on discipline and good time management. Often, however, necessary tasks like checking, reading and responding to emails can start to overtake productive work time and decrease your productivity – and in turn, your profitability. That is why it’s important for you to be managing emails, rather than letting emails manage you. Here are some pointers from the experts:
- Schedule time for checking emails; this can be once, twice, or three times daily at times that fit into your schedule. Block out time and when the time is up, move on to other pressing matters.
- Do not use email for emergency contacts; inform clients and business associates that you are not available immediately via email, and that they should phone or contact you via instant message, etc, for pressing matters. This makes it possible for you to handle emails in chunks rather than constantly dealing with them throughout the day. Be careful who you give emergency contact information to, though, so that it is used for its intended purpose.
- Turn off automatic alerts – both audio and visual – so that you are not tempted to immediately respond every time a new message comes in. This breaks into your productive work time.
- Deal with emails during your ‘down time’; do not schedule your most creative and productive times of day for organising emails. Put email management into your schedule where it makes sense – those times of day when you need to slow down, or that do not take away from more complex activities.
- Use tools for organising emails; get to know the features of your email client and use them to prioritise emails. For instance, use the ‘rules’ or ‘labels’ function to automatically separate emails into folders according to priority levels, clients, or subjects.
- Respond to emails when read; many people will read all emails before responding, and then go back and start with the most important ones. But this only multiplies the time it takes to get through the lot. espond to emails as they are read, and you will not have to begin all over again sifting through them.
- Separate business and personal emails; do not give out business email addresses to friends and family that do not have a business reason to contact you.
Email is a very useful and important business tool, but if you don’t learn how to efficiently manage your emails they will begin to take over your life.
Of course, everyone’s situation is going to be different and it may take a little while to find what works best for you, but if you start putting some of these tips into practise you’ll soon get control over your email. If not, perhaps it’s time to consider getting an assistant to help you respond to emails.
Do you ever submit a support ticket, anticipating the quick reply to some issue that you’ve tried in vain to solve yourself … only to be disappointed with the reply? Perhaps they didn’t fully answer your questions or they replied with more questions?
I’ve encountered some pretty dodgy support desks, but I must admit, 99.5% of the support tickets I’ve submitted have been answered promptly, friendly and – most importantly – they’ve solved the issue.
But there are a few key pointers in HOW YOU ACTUALLY ASK FOR HELP that will assist in you getting a useful reply:
- Be as clear as possible and give all the necessary information, including relevant URLs or site names. For example, “I can’t get the HTML to work right!”, or “Keep getting error messages with my website” don’t give enough information. Although you know exactly what website or task you’re referring to, the support staff reading your message may not know. The only way they can help you is to find out precisely what the problem is.
- If you receive a specific error message or number, include this in your support request.
- When you have multiple questions, begin each question on a new line, or even leave an extra space between lines. When you have several questions one after another, all in the one paragraph, it can be difficult for the support team member to read and questions can be easily missed.
- Keeping points 1, 2 and 3 in mind, don’t ramble. Keep your request as concise as possible while giving the necessary and relevant facts. Quite often, dot points or bullet points are fine, so long as all the information is there.
- If you need to register your email address in order for the support ticket response to be sent to you, please check that you’ve entered the correct email address. Then double-check it! It’s incredibly frustrating when someone asks for help and you give it, but then the email notification that their ticket has been answered bounces back.
- Although you may be frustrated by something that’s not working the way you think it should, support staff are there to help you … not bear the brunt of your frustrations. Try to remain calm and work with the support team to resolve the issues at hand.
- Before submitting your support ticket, check that you’ve followed instructions correctly – sometimes we try to do things quickly and mis-read the instructions. (Or think it’s so simple we don’t need to read them). It’s also possible to miss the fact that there even are instructions available. Often you’ll find sites will have tutorials or ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ pages available. Remember to check for these first as you may find the answers here quicker than waiting for a support ticket response – particularly if you are looking for solutions outside of business hours.
An additional tip … remember that support desks are staffed by people, not robots. Politeness and ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’, while not essential, are usually smiled upon. It’s also nice to be able to address the reply to a specific person, so please remember to sign off with your name.
If you’re like most business owners, you’ve seen many presenters at various seminars, workshops and events. And I’m sure you’d agree that these presenters or speakers come into three broad categories:
- The WOW! presenters
- The okay presenters and the
- The ‘I’d-rather-be-at-the-dentist-right-now-than-listening-to-you’ presenters
At some point in your business career there may come a time when YOU are required to speak to a group of people, even if it’s only a 5 minute talk at a networking event. So it’s good for you to be prepared and know some of the things that will help you fall into the first category above rather than the third one!
I’m not going to go into a lot of detail in this post but after hearing a highly respected professional business coach speak (and fall disappointingly into the third category) earlier this week, I thought I’d share what I believe to be his biggest downfall … his inability to read the crowd.
There’s no doubt that this speaker had spent a lot of time preparing his spiel. In fact, he seemed to have memorized every single word – and joke – and I’m sure he spent countless hours rehearsing. While it’s great to prepare your presentation and to practise it, the problem was that he wasn’t reading the audience at all. Or if he was, he had no idea what they were silently telling him nor how to adapt his presentation to remedy the issues at hand.
As I looked around the room I saw the majority of attendees sitting with notepads and pens on their laps … but virtually nobody was writing anything down.
Many were sitting with their arms crossed and in such a way that they were telling him, “We don’t believe you. We’re not sure that we agree with what you’re saying. Show us why we should listen to you, let alone sign up and pay to be coached by you.”
Others were fidgeting, sighing, wriggling or whispering to the person next to them … these people were bored or not interested.
Then he really came unstuck when he asked for some audience participation and he didn’t get it. Although he pushed and pushed for it, the audience didn’t want to participate and the speaker appeared at a total loss as to how to continue.
I don’t think he’d planned for this, yet their participation was crucial to the point he wanted to make. So in pushing a bit more for that audience participation … he snapped and his frustration showed. I strongly suspect that raising his voice to criticize his audience probably didn’t win him any fans.
Now the thing is, it’s natural to be nervous when speaking in public, especially if you’re very new to it. But this guy promotes himself as a professional speaker with years of experience so I really did expect more.
For the average business owner who needs to do the occasional presentation, I highly recommend you read up on body language and learn how to read your audience. Then have a few strategies up your sleeve as to how you might encourage them to warm to you, show them that you’re credible, get them to participate and so on.
An excellent book for this is The Definitive Book Of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease.
You’ll find that understanding body language can help in your day to day interactions with others too.
And while it’s important that you plan and rehearse what you’re going to say, don’t be so stringent that you can’t be flexible too.
One of the blogs I love to read regularly is Claire McFee’s Organize Your Life.
It’s full of straight-forward tips and Claire’s personal strategies for being better organized in all areas of life.
Claire’s recent post on Gratitude is one that really resonates with me. I truly believe that what you focus on is what you will get. In this post Claire talks about Dr.John Demartini, author of “The Gratitude Effect”, and his belief that, “What you think about and thank about, you bring about.” She then goes on to discuss how this theory works with your moods, thoughts and feelings, and how your current mood can be reflected in those around you.
So if you’ve got a minute to spare, I encourage you to pop over and have a read of this post. Then, next time everyone around you seems to be grumpy or snapping at you, perhaps you need to stop and look at your own mood.
Twitter has really taken off recently with more and more people, including business owners, joining the Twitterverse every day.
And every day I send off a series of links to help new twitterers to understand how to RT, reply, hashtags, DMs and various other applications that will help them make the most of the experience.
I decided that rather than sending off 25 links to my favourite resources, I’m going to list them here. Makes sense, right?
So, here are my suggestions for compulsory reading for new Tweeters:
General:
Applications To Help Manage Your Tweets:
Applications For Mobiles:
Blackberry Applications:
Free Background Templates:
Twitter Graphics:
- Siah Designs
- Randa Clay Designs
- Vincent Abray – while the site is written in French the buttons’ text is in English and they are all absolutely gorgeous! (Not to mention the gorgeous language – I LOVE French… a bit like Morticia Addams whenever Gomez started speaking in French, for those who used to watch the Addams Family)
Ahem… getting back on track here…
Other Useful Applications:
These are my favourite applications and sites. I hope you find them helpful. Happy Twittering!
Don’t forget… you can follow me at Twitter.com/DonnaMarieC
I just went to the Business Mums Blog to check the dates of their up-coming Business Mums Conference but was quickly side-tracked reading through some other posts.
This one really caught my attention as it’s something I’ve been dealing with a bit over the last week… “You didn’t get my email? Did you check your junk mail folder? Is it caught in your SPAM filter? Oh, you missed it in amongst the other 794 emails you’ve received today. Well, at least we know it did arrive.”
Yep, the saga of the missing email. Anyway, here’s a post that Melissa wrote recently about what to do when email fails.
Oh, and I did eventually get to the details for the next Business Mums Conference. If you’re interested, it’s on in Melbourne from June 21-22.
