A few years ago I was asked to speak on a panel of female entrepreneurs to discuss our journey into the world of business ownership. At the same time, I was in the middle of a resolution I had committed to. A resolution I called the 'Year of No” and that included email.
The Year of No was a decision to stop doing things I didn’t want to do - and that was my only rule. Do I want to do that? No? Awesome. Strike it from the to-do list. If I didn’t want to do it, but knew I’d be grateful later that I did - then yes, I did it.
Things like working out, eating spinach, going grocery shopping… you get the picture. Things I didn’t want to do? Answer unsolicited emails for 3-4 hours a day. If you have your own business, can you relate? Getting inundated with pitches, sales emails, and the like was overwhelming me and I hated it. Email can be a one way communication and I realized I’m not obligated to engage in unsolicited communication. Look at it this way: If you were at dinner with your favorite person in the world and someone you don’t know just walked up, pulled up a chair, sat down and started talking, would you stop everything and give your time and attention to this stranger? Heck no! Would you feel great about your dinner if you spent it answering the questions or entertaining a perfect stranger for hours instead of your favorite person in the world? You would feel terrible and so would they. It’s the same thing with your business. Your business and your customers/tribe/subscribers are one of your favorite people in the world, and if you are spending a huge part of your day answering emails that are not serving your favorite people or moving your business forward - they are not a priority.Email has taken over our lives and it’s not something we have to be slaves to. I get around 200 emails per day, and I’m sure you do too. Maybe 10 of them I respond to. The other 190, sorry, deleted. These are unsolicited time wasters and definitely not good for business. I’m not talking about customer service emails, those emails 100% serve your business, and come from your favorite people in the world. They do deserve time and attention, but not necessarily from you. Set up a wiki, FAQs, better customer on-boarding and hire a dedicated person or team to help you take care of your customers. Companies are realizing how unproductive email really is and have moved to a completely no-email system or severely reduced email. They’ve set up effective systems to take care of customer inquiries and use other communications tools like Slack within their office. Companies like Jet and Lush have dramatically cut email usage internally. So free yourself from the notion that every piece of communication that flies your way is your responsibility. It’s not. Your responsibility is to serve your customers and employees with the time and attention they need to be as successful as possible - and you can’t do that if you are answering emails for hours each day.
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