It only takes 20 minutes of email a day to manage a company and, Adam Steele’s recently published article provides all the information one needs to cut down on the amount of time spent answering emails. “Most of the email people receive is unimportant and not worth a moment's thought,” says Adam Steele. “The sooner we recognize that and set up system to catch the important stuff, the sooner we are free to focus on our superpowers.”
Before discovering his current method of work, Steele spent two hours a day answering emails in addition to the all the time spent sifting through his inbox to find any important emails buried at the bottom of the long list of spam. Wherever one finds themselves on the scale of wasting time with email, Steele promises that there is a better way of working. Instead of spending time reading, organizing, and replying to emails, Steele’s method creates the opportunity to spend more time actually being productive—or even on leisure activities.
His method involves spending 100 days optimizing one’s inbox to ensure that accessing, sorting and responding to emails is as quick and convenient a process as possible. Making use of information found in Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Workweek, Jason Fried’s Rework, and The Effective Executive by David Heinemeir Hansson and Peter Drucker, Steele created and implemented the method that has allowed him to cut the time spent dealing with emails down to a minimum. Getting to the point where it takes only 20 minutes on any given day to get through one’s emails without missing anything important takes a lot of time and work, and thus Steele’s method requires a hundred days to begin truly taking effect.
The first step is a kind of self audit that involves spending one week without reading any emails, best done while on vacation when it is less likely that any emergencies will come up. Being ‘always on’ isn’t necessary, according to Steele, as it is very likely to get one to the point where they are wasting time. In order to discover how much time he was wasting on reading emails, Steele started tracking every second that he spent managing them. When he first started tracking his time spent with emails, the average came up to about an hour every day, and double on some days. Auditing oneself has only one instruction, according to Steele: “Turn on the timer whenever you read your email.”
Once the period of time spent on emails has been measured, the program then splits into milestones categorized by months. The first month focuses on elimination and automation. Websites that regularly send dozens of emails that remain unread should be identified and eliminated. If unsubscribing is ineffective, it might be necessary to mark all emails from that particular website as spam, to be moved to the spam folder automatically.
If the emails are necessary, rarely used features like filters can help decrease the clutter in one’s inbox. People are often surprised at how effective filters can be in reducing inbox clutter. In Gmail, it is possible to filter to archive, filter to labels, filter and forward to someone else and many other things that make sorting through emails a lot easier. There are also services like Zapier and IFTTT that help users automate their inboxes. After a month of doing this, it quickly becomes clear which emails need responses and which ones don’t.
The second stage of the program is testing and documentation, combined with delegating. It involves the creation of a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for whoever one chooses to delegate their inbox so they can answer important questions quickly without having to ask their superior. Steele based his own FAQ on the template provided in Tim Ferriss’ book. Delegation is necessary for anyone looking to cut down the time spent answering emails and increase general productivity. Steele himself hired an assistant to manage his emails, and it only takes her an hour to attend to all of them.
The last part of the program is creating a plan which will allow the user to automate the management of emails. Once this process is complete, they can start creating daily briefings, instead of having to read and respond to each individual email.
The program has helped Steele move from spending several hours on emails daily to only 20 minutes per day. With Adam Steele’s program, it is possible to save up to 850 hours every year on emails and use that time on friends and family, to plan another project, or to simply take time off. For a way to make responding to emails faster, easier, and less time consuming—and generally manage your inbox better—use Adam Steele’s inbox management method.
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For more information about The Steele Entrepreneur Show, contact the company here:
The Steele Entrepreneur Show
Adam Steele
(604) 256-3362
hello@magistrateinc.com
170-422 Richards Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z4
