My name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer.
For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...
Yes, I become a slave to email. As my businesses grew, so did my email. Everything was funneling into one place and critical emails were being lost! Also, how much time did I actually spend looking useless email? The solution is simple, yet most of us are too lazy to spend the 5 minutes to do it! (I was!)
Are you a slave to your email these days?
I have to admit it, but until about 6 months ago, I had about 42,000 emails sitting in my Microsoft Outlook InBox. The worst thing is that I probably looked at every single one of them, too.
How many of these were actually important? Probably about 5% of them. The rest just wasted my time…
The Problem: I started to reach a point with my email that the hundreds I would receive per day were literally taking over my business life. I admit that I subscribe to a lot of lists, do a lot of Google Alerts, run a lot of affiliate offers and sell a lot of products myself.
Some things are important! - Customer support tickets are important.
Some are awesome but are irrelevant! - Affiliate sales and merchant receipts.
Some are good to archive! - Like Google Alerts and Lead Reports
But if they are all funneling into the same place (i.e., your InBox), you are wasting a lot of time sorting out what is important and what is not. Further, we either leave it all in our InBox (just in case we need that Mike Filsaime offer from 3 weeks ago in two months, right??? J/K) or we manually move it or delete it. In theory that works, but after about 3 days, I lose interest and my InBox just balloons.
The Answer: I am not exactly sure why I did this or what prompted me to actually try to do this. I kind of knew this functionality was there but I chose (i.e., too lazy) to actually use it.
It is so simple, too. Instead of categorize your emails after looking at them, let Outlook do it before they reach your InBox.
With a simple right click, you are able to easily create sub-folders WHILE also creating delivery rules, too.
If an email comes from Clickbank, create a rule to put it into the “Clickbank” folder.
If the email has the world “Direct Message from” in the subject, put it into a “Direct Message” folder.
I now do this with Affiliate sales, Merchant Reports, Google Alerts, PayPal notifications, ODesk management - You name it!
Once the rule is created, Outlook will automatically reassign the message to its assigned folder. (You can create other rules, too, but this is the one I currently use the most!)
This solves two problems!
1) I have much less email in my InBox. Also, I can quickly glance at folders to get an overview of my sales, my support issues, and my reports. No need to dig through hundreds of emails each day to find the important ones.
2) Organization! This forces the important emails into sub-folders so I don’t have to do it myself. It keeps your InBox clean and your archives cleaner.
I know this may sound really simple, but too many of us don’t do simple things like this to improve our productivity. And there are ways of creating similar filters with your Gmail accounts or any email management system.
Personally, I am not against email at all (in fact, I like it!). But it can be distracting. Let the software be your secretary so you can focus on more important things (like solving the critical issues…and actually making money online!).
cheers…matt
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I’ll bookmark your site!
June 18th, 2010 at 2:24 am