by: Bill Ringle
Focus is a key driver of growth in a small business, so anything that distracts your focus threatens your ability to deliver results to your current customers and grow your to a new level.
Oddly, e-mail is a huge threat to your productivity, and that’s probably the opposite of what many entrepreneurs think now.
They think that by checking and immediately responding to e-mail, they’re being responsive and helpful.
Sometimes that’s true, but as a habit, it’s a huge waste of time because it feeds the myth of multitasking. Studies have shown that focus leads to greater productivity – advance a single project a mile instead of 20 projects an inch.
When you decide to break the chain e-mail has strapping you down to lower productivity, consider these 5 tips:
- Avoid checking e-mail the first thing in the morning. Instead, spend the first hour of your day working on your top priority.
- Turn off the feature that auto checks e-mail. Instead check it only 3-4 times a day at intervals you choose and that make sense for your role.
- When you read an e-mail that requires a reply, reply right away. Don’t set it aside and read another e-mail because you’ll be creating another thing to return to at a later time. Completeness is the goal, especially for people in a leadership capacity.
- Prepare a set of answers to the most common questions you answer and save them somewhere easily accessible in your e-mail client. You can use that trick for things as simple as meeting agendas to direction to your office to the steps to use the electronic postage meter.
- Set up an autoresponder to set expectations. It’s like using the “vacation mail” feature more strategically on a day-to-day basis. You can set it up to reply to inbound messages with something like, “Hi, thanks for your message. I’ll be able to reply to my in box mail today between 3 and 3:30 pm. If something is urgent, please call this number and my assistant will be able to help you.”
In the conversations I have with entrepreneurs and small business owners, I hear directly how much time and quality of attention is recovered once these simple e-mail habits are followed. I hope you find a similar boost to your productivity.
About the Author:
Entrepreneurs can find more resources to build their business at: www.mybusinessgym.com
Bill Ringle works with business leaders from high tech and professional service entrepreneurs in the Greater Philadelphia region and shares the strategies and tools for accelerating growth through my Business Gym with business leaders from across the United States and in 15 different countries.
