As a business person, there are very few things more daunting than seeing that little red bubble above your email icon, telling you of the hundreds, or even thousands of unopened emails that await your attention. Adding to this stress is our lack of time to tackle these emails, and so the number just keeps growing! How lovely it would be to bulk edit or delete them all, but of course this is ineffective, and at the end of the day, a temporary bandaid solution. So what to do? Productivity guru, Merlin Mann, also experienced this feeling so he developed a solution–Inbox Zero–something Daylite Mail Assistant can help you achieve!
What is inbox zero?
Inbox Zero is a system created by Marlin Mann to solve the problem of getting stuck in your inbox. This system helps with email management by allowing you to efficiently clear your inbox. Mann explains, the most valuable and irreplaceable resources a person has are their time and attention. When these two things are focussed on your inbox, your work suffers and productivity decreases. Instead, he explains that you should “process” your emails quickly by putting little focus on the emails and just attention on the action required of them, so you can power through your inbox and get on with your day. This way you can move through your inbox quickly, removing the clutter from your inbox that drives you crazy.
The idea is to spend as little time as possible in your inbox by taking action from each email, then deleting or archiving the email. The result is less clutter to stress about and more time to focus on your work.
Not just a methodology – it’s a mindset!
To achieve Inbox Zero, we must first invest time in changing our avoidant/habitual ways upfront, building new habits that will make us less overwhelmed and more productive and efficient.
First, it is important to reduce the ‘noise’ in your inbox:
- eliminate emails that do not serve the work you are doing:
- unsubscribe from irrelevant email lists
- opt out of Spam emails
- set boundaries around the unproductive emails you receive from humans. For example, kindly thank your co-worker for sending weekly updates on their chickens, but let him know you would like to be removed from the list. Offer a phone number for your coworker to call should something urgent come up.
We want to foster good habits, which requires breaking the bad ones – which can be hard to do, no doubt! But committing to the above effective practices regularly will help decrease the amount of emails you receive, and subsequently must sort through. The consistency of investing small bits of time now will save you loads of time and unnecessary stress later, and allow you to begin seeing the fruits of your (focused) labour!
Once you have reduced the noise in your inbox, you are now better set up to tackle the emails you have that are relevant to your work. You can now consider your inbox as a hub that houses communication requiring triage.
This is where Daylite comes in!
Your inbox is NOT a to-do list or an information/reference bank, so don’t treat it that way. With Daylite, get out of your inbox! Directly convert productive emails requiring an activity into tasks, appointments, follow-ups, etc. What’s more, by building the habit of making your relevant emails immediately actionable and linking them to their related items within Daylite, including Contacts, Companies, Appointments, Tasks, and more, you are building your Daylite database–a rich detailed history of your business–all in one place.
How Daylite and Daylite Mail Assistant helps with each action:
Delete/Archive
If an email requires no response or follow up work, you can simply delete it or archive it. Daylite Mail Assistant allows you to save and link the email to an item in Daylite so that even if you’ve deleted the email from your inbox, you can still find and refer to the details of the email in Daylite.
Delegate
When an email requires work for someone else on your team to do, you can create a task from your Mail window with Daylite Mail Assistant, and delegate the task to a team member. The email is linked to the task (and the contact who it), so your team member has all the information they need to complete the task. One of the many benefits of this workflow is that you can assign a due date to the task, so your team member can prioritize the task easily, rather than having to process the email and then decide on when to complete the task. This saves them an extra step and means one less email in their inbox.
Respond
For emails that require a response, you can reply to the email as you normally would, and use Daylite Mail Assistant to link the correspondence to the person’s contact record. You can link the email to a person, company, project, sales opportunity, appointment, or more depending on what the email is relevant to. This way you and your team members can easily refer back to important details regarding a project, an opportunity, or just correspondence with the person or company in general. This not only saves time because your team doesn’t need to ask what was discussed in an email because they can see it all in Daylite, but also because all relevant details are linked to the related contact so no one has to waste time sifting through email folders.
Defer
An email requires this action when there is something that needs to be done but not right away. For example, the email requires a lengthy or thought-out response, or work needs to be done but you require more information or time to complete it. With Daylite Mail Assistant you can link it within Daylite, turning the email into a task, linking it to the appropriate Company and/or Contact (so you have all the information you need at your fingertips, anytime!) and assign a due date and reminder for you to respond or do the work at a later time. This allows you to remove the email from the blackhole of your inbox (ensuring it doesn’t get lost in all the clutter), while book-marking it for later to ensure nothing falls through the cracks!
Do
This is an action for emails that require work to be done, a conversation to take place, or a meeting to be scheduled. From Mail, you can turn this email into a task, a project, an opportunity, or an appointment using Daylite Mail Assistant. The email is linked to the object in Daylite so when it comes time to do the task or have the meeting, you can quickly refer back to refresh your memory, without needing to scroll through your inbox.
Spend Your Time Where it Counts!
With Daylite and Daylite Mail Assistant, take action directly from each email so you can get out of your inbox and get back to working. Your emails are organized and connected to the relevant people, things, and appointments so you can always refer to them as needed, without wasting time digging through your inbox.
Achieving Inbox Zero with Daylite allows you to get out of your inbox and into Daylite where emails become actionable and productive. Save time and stress so you can put your energies elsewhere towards growing your business, all while building a rich business history in an organized targeted way that sets you up for success now, and for years to come!
Check out this video on Achieving Inbox Zero with Daylite!
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