I was sitting in a bar with my Bombay Sapphire and tonic when my good friend exclaimed (too proudly for my liking) “I get 100 work emails a day and another 60 to my personal emmail account.” I was nothing short of devastated FOR THE LOVE OF A HIGHER BEING!!! What are you doing?
When I probed they revealed “I get lots of email that comes is LinkedIn, Eventbrite, Meet Up, newsletters, offers.
Unfortunately my dear engaging people the email game is not unusual, tempted as it is to start ranting about Nimble I’ll skip to something you can do NOW!
1. Un-subscribe from EVERYTHING, go to your email settings on all your social networks and set them to NEVER, or at the most a weekly update. Maybe, just maybe, there will be one discussion that you are really into.
2. Download the apps for Eventbrite, Meet Up, LinkedIn to your phone and “do your social” while you are standing in line at the supermarket. You can RSVP for events here too – SO MUCH EASIER!
3. Use Hootsuite to manage all your facebook, twitter, LinkedIn updates, groups,in one app – if you get an email every time something happens on twitter don’t you think you are kind of missing the point?
4. More unsubscribe – I get just four emails from newsletters / blogs everything else I look for online at a set time or have an alert set up in Hootsuite.
5. When I did my big I WANT YOU TO UN-SUBSCRIBE email for the Engaging People newsletter 400 people did, some of these people just hate me but most were smart people to whom I am connected on twitter and know what is going on anyway, why on earth would you want another email?
6. The real email fun is the email game and boomerang by Baydin. The email game lets you race through your inbox and either delete, skip or file, you can decide what to do with 100 emails in less than 10 minutes and then get to work on what actually matters. Boomerang for Outlook and Boomerang for Gmail both act like a snooze button for email and let you clean up your inbox fast, it is amazing what does not really matter in the end…..
7. The real problems are being afraid of ‘missing a bit’ or being daring enough to take the time to look at how you actually work. When I switch my beloved internet off I get TEN TIMES more work done, and when I decided to follow just four podcasts, 10 blogs and read a book a week and NOTHING ELSE a lot of good stuff “suddenly” happened.
People often say to me that they don’t have time for social media, well they have time for watching TV, playing the email game, surfing the net, reading newspapers, printing flyer and answering the phone if it rings – is there an app for that?
Be Smart, be connected but be in control
Get insights from 5 Million Emails by the email game [Infographic]
