Life Is Like a Box Of Chocolates...

If you’re like me, you get a lot of email.  I recently went on my own little jihad of unsubscribing from everything that I hadn’t read in the last four or five months.  My goal was to reduce the sheer number of incoming emails that I have to wade through to get to the relevant stuff.  But even after I went through and deleted the “optional read” items, I had over 200 emails I hadn’t yet dealt with.  It was overwhelming.  So, I set up a system.

I decided to sort my incoming emails into categories so I could deal with similar items all at once.  Here are the categories I created:

• Check On Me/Track Me  (these are ongoing projects that don’t need my daily attention, but once a week I’ll check to see what’s outstanding)
• Print Me (since I’m not often near a printer with my laptop)
• Process Me (these require some action or research on my part, this includes things like setting up new social media profiles, answering questions on social media sites, TweetLater alerts, Facebook requests, etc.)
• Read Me  (anything that is not time critical, but which is still of interest)
• Research Me  (I’m currently doing research on a new health insurance policy, so this is in there, but it could be anything where I am collecting data to compare and contrast)
• Respond To Me  (these are emails that require a personal response from me for one reason or another)
• Schedule Me (these are items that require me adding them to my calendar.  Ideally, I’ll get to the point where I have my calendar online and I can have my assistant handle these emails)

Sort – Don’t DO!
My first goal was to take the items from my inbox and move them into the categories.  The important thing was not to get distracted by doing anything with each of them, but just to figure out the appropriate category and move them immediately into that box.  This took some discipline on my part and I found myself more than once “doing” instead of sorting, but I got it done in about half an hour – and I deleted a lot of stuff that was no longer relevant along the way.  Not bad. 

Quick Wins
Then I went through and did the quick win items.  I printed all of the “Print Me” items and filed them away.  (Something else that should be outsourced to an in-house assistant whenever possible.)  Then I scheduled all of the “Schedule Me” items.  Within just another half hour, I was done with another 20 items from my list. 

Delegate
Then it was time to sit down and plow through the Process stuff.  I found that I could outsource a goodly amount of my Process stuff to my assistant.  So that got stuff off my desk as well.  Now I’m just left with 75 emails that require a response from me – however brief.  That’s a much ore manageable number than 500.  I can deal with that. 

Remove Distractions

I moved all of my read emails to a “Completed” folder so that I can search easily if I need to find something, but they aren’t sitting and staring me in the face.  Now, the only things in my “Inbox” are items to be categorized.  I can breathe again!

Get On Track

So how is your email box looking?  Does it seem like a monster stealing away your time and energy?  Try what I did and take items down to bite-sized pieces.  Good luck and happy sorting!

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Kelle Sparta, author of The Consultative Real Estate Agent, is one of the top innovators in the industry. She thinks outside of the box and she does it with style, which is how she managed to sell 25 houses her first year in the business in a market just like this one in an area where she had no sphere of influence! Kelle's innovative techniques took her to the top of the market in 1993 and they can take you there now. Kelle has coached agents from around the country who have been producing as much as $45 million per year in gross volume. Now she brings her unique style of real estate to you. Her dynamic presentation skills, high energy approach, and brilliant new ideas are sure to be the highlight of your day. Kelle is the founder of Sparta Success Systems, a real estate training company that provides products, coaching and training to empower agents and brokers to create lives and businesses they can love. For more information, visit her website at http://www.spartasuccess.com/. © 2009, Kelle Sparta.