MBA2415 How to Spend Less Time in Your Email Inbox in 2024 + Free Ride Friday

0:08Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. Helpful business strategies to help you build a better business with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today is Free Ride Friday. Make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. Every Friday, we give away a free ride to the$100 MBA program over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review, and you enter our weekly random draw. We call Free Ride Friday. In today's lesson, you will learn how to spend less time in your email inbox in 2024.

0:46This is an important lesson I wanted to teach early on in the year because spending time and energy in your email inbox can be draining. It's incredibly time-consuming. And if you can be more efficient, if you can spend less time managing your inbox and more time building and growing your business, it's going to directly impact your bottom line and help you grow faster. I always say that your email inbox is everybody else's to-do list. What do I mean by that? Well, when you get an email in your inbox, it's usually somebody sending you something, asking you to do something, asking you if you want to work with them, asking you if you want to buy something, asking you if you want to be on their podcast or be featured in their newsletter, asking, asking, asking other people's to-do lists.

1:32Your job is to work on your own to-do list and build a strong business. So how do you avoid all this? How do you save more time in your inbox and only focus on the emails that actually matter? Well, I'm going to share with you my key strategies when it comes to spending less time in your inbox this year. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start with the ultimate strategy. This is not to deal with email at all. I know it sounds crazy, but a lot of productive, high-performing people do this. They have what's called a managed inbox. Somebody manages their email for them. Basically, they say, my time is too valuable to be spent in my inbox.

2:16So they get an assistant and they're in their email and they will let them know what's important and what's not. A famous example of this is Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, who's known to not have access to his own email inbox. He actually has his own assistant. He meets with her 10 minutes every morning and she just tells him, these are the important things you need to make a decision on. This needs your attention. And he literally just tells her, hey, this is what I want to do with these items. This is my reply. And then she go ahead and replies on his behalf and takes care of those important emails.

2:54This is the ultimate thing. If you can afford this, if you can hire an executive assistant, and by the way, it could be affordable. and you may not even need somebody full-time. There's a lot of great talent out of the Philippines for$300,$400 a month part-time, $500,$600,$700 full-time. You just got to give up this idea that your inbox is private. Now remember, you're not posting everything in your inbox to the world. This is just one person having access and you can do this in a secure way so they don't have access to your password, but essentially they will be able to manage your inbox for you.

3:27And you can just do this for your busiest inboxes, like your business email. So this is the ultimate solution. Have it managed by somebody else and then they can send you a message. They can ping you somewhere, send you a WhatsApp and say, hey, nothing for today. Or today there's two things you need to make a decision on. Here they are. Let me know what you want to do and I'll get back to them. I know people will do this and just reply with a voice memo. So whether they're at the gym or they're going for a walk or they're driving, they can easily just go ahead and leave a voice memo and dictate what they want.

3:58And it's done. Within a few minutes, they're done with email. Now, if you don't want to go down this route, which is the ultimate route, outsourcing your inbox, that's okay. I got plenty of other strategies to help you spend less time in your inbox. Let's get into it. First thing, unsubscribe like a mad person. Go into your inbox and unsubscribe to any emails or newsletters or any kind of automatic emails you get that you haven't read in the last month. If you haven't read an email from this person that you've been subscribed to or this organization in the last month, go ahead and unsubscribe to them.

4:35Get to the footer, click on subscribe, get rid of them. They're flooding your inbox and they're really making it hard for you to focus on what's important. There's so much email you have to go through. And sometimes you can miss important emails because you have so many other emails in the inbox that kind of clutter things. A lot of people don't want to do this for some reason. Go ahead and do it. Guess what? You can always subscribe again if you miss the emails. But if you don't miss them, then it means you did the right thing. So get really vigilant, get brutal, and unsubscribe to anything you haven't read in a month.

5:10This alone is going to help you tremendously and get focused in your inbox. Number two, use labels. This is a great feature in Gmail where you can create labels, and they're kind of like folders. Sometimes you need to be subscribed to certain emails, notifications, maybe their services you use. You don't want to unsubscribe, but you don't necessarily need to have it in your inbox. You don't necessarily need to see it. You can just have it there just so you have it. And you can go to it if you need to. This is where labels come in. You can just create a label. Let's say, for example, you're getting emails from Amazon.

5:46Create a label called Amazon. And then the next time you get an email from Amazon, you can go to the triple dots in the top right hand corner and choose the option that says filter messages like this. You can then have the email instead of just landing in your inbox, land in the filter. So anytime you get an email, it'll go into the filter and it'll be just on the left hand column. If you ever want to go and check those emails out, review them, you can go ahead and do that. I do this with all the services that I subscribe to because, you know, you're getting sent invoices or receipts or payment notifications or, you know, emails like sign in notifications.

6:23You sign in from another device. So that kind of stuff. A lot of those emails pile up and they clutter your inbox. And it's just a lot of time trying to delete them, archive them. Filtering them is great. And making this automatic is a great feature. So these first couple tips are all about cleaning things up and minimizing the number of emails you need to deal with. Here's another. With Gmail, there's a great feature that's called send an archive. This means when you reply to an email, you have this option, and you can hit send an archive, and this archives the email, so it doesn't show up in all the lists of emails in your inbox.

6:58It just archives it, and then it comes back into your inbox if they reply to you again. This, again, cleans things up and makes things easier for you when you go to your inbox to look at what's important. Next, we're going to go into some practices. Time blocking your email. You should spend no more than 10 minutes every morning and every evening when you start and end your workday. 10 minutes here, 10 minutes here, that's it. Never check email outside of these times unless something urgent is there or something you're expecting. But most of the time, you should not be checking outside of these times.

7:33The reason why we're doing this is because you actually spend a lot of time checking email, reading email, and not replying to it. You have to reply to most emails that are important. So by time-lotting things and saying, hey, I have 10 minutes to read and reply, this allows you to be more efficient and only worry about email in those 20 minutes a day. Next, you might be thinking 10 minutes, that's pretty short. Well, you're going to be short in your emails. You're going to be as short as possible. You don't have to say hey or hello or have a salutation. And your real savior is a little thing you're going to add to your signature.

8:09In the signature that you have in your emails, you can just simply say, sorry for being so short. I wanted to make sure I get back to you quickly. That's it. And this kind of saves you from, hey, why is this person not saying hello or saying best or something at the end of the email? And this shows that, hey, you really care about them. You want to get back to them quickly. You're just trying to be efficient. So you can literally just reply, get to the body of the email, and that's it. We talked about the signature and having a little message, but your signature should be something that allows you to reproduce information quickly.

8:43So even if you want to have a salutation like cheers or best or whatever, add that to your signature so it's at the bottom of every message no matter what, along with your name and your contact details on social if they need it. My next strategy is a two-prong one. One is try as much as possible to only do email on your laptop or computer because you can be a lot faster and you can be a lot more efficient on the computer than on your phone trying to type and trying to do it on the go. By having this time allotted in the morning and the evening, you don't really need to do this anytime on the go unless it's an emergency.

9:18The second part of this is using something called TextExpander, which is a great little app that you can install on your computer that allows you to do shortcuts for common phrases, common things that you would write in the email. So say, for example, you have sponsorships on your YouTube channel. There's going to be some common phrases, common paragraphs even that you're going to put together for people that are interested in sponsoring your YouTube channel. It might be something like, hey, sponsoring our YouTube channel is fast and easy. Here's our rate card. Take a look at it. It's attached.

9:50And let me know which package you want to go for. Now, instead of going to write that all out every time you reply to an email that's inquiring about sponsorship, you can use TextExpander, which allows you to create basically a set code or keystrokes that will just auto-populate all this information right on your screen. I like to start all my TextExpander commands with X because I don't really write a lot of words starting with X. So for example, in this example, I can just type X sponsor and it would just auto populate all this information. Pretty cool. You remember when I said you should only check email 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening?

10:26Well, those are the days that you're actually looking at email. You don't need to check email every day unless you have very, very time sensitive things happening. And as long as you set up expectations, that's okay. Some people I know have an autoresponder that just sends an email anytime somebody sends them an email. So for example, they get an email and automatically they send an email that says, Hey, thanks for your email. I usually respond between 48 and 72 hours. Thanks for your patience. This is kind of like a vacation mode responder, which people set when they're away on vacation, but they just set it up for always.

11:02So that way they don't feel the pressure to need to get back to people immediately. And then if they get back to them quicker than 48 to 72 hours, Then they under-promised, over-delivered. My last piece of advice is to tell you that not every email requires a reply. Some people think they need to reply to every single email. No, most emails don't need to be replied to at all. They're not asking something of you or you're required to reply in any way. Then you could just leave it in the inbox or just archive it. It could just be an FYI. In the beginning of my entrepreneurial career, I used to reply to every single email.

11:37I just wanted to be nice and polite. And it is nice, but we want to make sure that we are saving our time or energy so that we make a bigger impact on other people's lives by growing our business and improving. So if you don't need to reply, if it doesn't require you to take action on anything, don't need to reply. There you have it. These are enough strategies for you to get going and spend less time in your inbox this year. Remember, you want to work less in your business and on your business. You want to grow your business. You want to be able to build assets that can allow you to grow your revenue, grow your audience, grow your presence.

12:11And sometimes email will just drag you down. So spend less time this year, please. I challenge you to do so. That wraps up today's lesson, but today's episode is not over. Let's see who won this week's free ride to the$100 MBA. And the winner is OCMLR. That's the handle on Apple Podcast. OC says podcasting. Yeah, five stars. I love the podcasting topic. I'm an up-and-coming host myself and love the info shared in that episode. I'll be seeking it out a year from now, as you advised, just to show my listeners that I'm serious too. Thanks, OCMLR, for that great review and congrats for starting your podcast.

12:50Your mission is to email me at omar at 100mba.net so I can hook you up with a free ride to the$100 MBA program over at 100mba.net. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. We call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like right now to see if you want. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes when we're working on our email inbox, we feel like we're doing work. We're busy. We're doing business. But really, it's just an administrative work. This is not the kind of work that usually brings in a lot of money.

13:24Even if you're cutting deals and making sales via email, you don't need to do it yourself. You can get somebody to do that for you and assistant, at least to the point where you're actually making the sale. And if you are doing that yourself, that's fine. But those are the only emails you should be dealing with, the ones that bring in cash. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

13:54Thank you.