[Exceptional Influence] Inbox Zero for Consultants
There are certain things that can derail any business owner, including consultants. And one of the most common is our inbox.
When I work with new clients, most of the time they haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about how to manage their inbox. But so many of them feel weighed down and burdened by the pressure to handle everything that comes into their email every day and in a timely fashion. As you're growing, if you don't have an effective way to manage this tool it will quickly turn into quicksand.
Pippa was one of those clients. When we started working together, she felt completely overwhelmed by the time it was taking to manage her inbox. Whenever emails came into her inbox, and this happened very frequently, she became distracted from the work that she was doing. She felt like she needed to handle those issues right away, which meant she wasn’t able to focus on her client's work.
When she put off handling her emails, she’d find herself having to deal with everything in the evening or at night. This began to cut into her family and personal time and left her feeling more time poor and overburdened than ever.
When we spoke about it, Pippa understood that the inbox was her issue. But her feeling was that she was doing something wrong. As she said to me, ‘I just need to be more disciplined.’
It’s not about discipline.
For Pippa, and for every consultant, managing your inbox is not about discipline. At least it shouldn’t be. And as I said to her, ‘Why make it harder? Let’s try to make it effortless.’ And to make it effortless we need to delegate.
Achieving inbox zero for consultants is about delegation, not discipline
Research show that the average person receives 121 business-related emails every day. Just like Pippa was experiencing, this level of communication can stifle our ability to actually get any high impact work done. It becomes the vampire on your time so if you haven't taken control, it's time to!
A great quote about managing your inbox comes from Merlin Mann, creator of 43folders.com, a popular American website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work. He said, ‘It’s about how to reclaim your email, your attention, and your life…. It’s not how many messages are in your inbox – it’s how much of your own brain is in that inbox. Especially when you don’t want it to be.’
Our job to achieve inbox zero is not about discipline – which is just more pressure on us as individuals to do more. It’s about delegation. It’s about getting our minds out of that inbox and onto the work that only you can really do which is creating your IP, selling your programs or delivering (speaking, workshops, coaching etc).
The challenge with achieving inbox zero
The challenge with achieving inbox zero is usually dopamine. Checking our inbox is often done on autopilot and is driven by our subconscious need for a dopamine hit. When we check our email, we can often check off a task or answer a question or get an answer ourselves. This makes us feel good and releases those feel-good dopamine chemicals. And this can become a bit of an addiction.
We have to break that habit of constantly checking our inbox if we want to achieve inbox zero and get our minds out of the inbox.
The inbox zero system
Getting our minds out of our inbox is simply a matter of creating the right system. For our inbox zero system, first we need to set up a couple of simple folders. Second, we need to triage. And third, we need to respond.
Set up your folders
The first step is to set up just a couple of folders, not one for all your projects or clients. These simple couple of folders will allow your VA or EA to take the next step of triaging your ‘to dos’ out of your inbox. For every consultant looking to achieve inbox zero this will look different. But for me this essentially means just two: a folder assigned to me, called "Jane to Action" and assigned to my EA, Gemma, called "Gemma to Action"
Gemma’s folder will contain nearly all the emails that come through my inbox. She can action anything relating to meetings, to organising workflow with the team, to adding tasks to my calendar, to providing responses to clients and potential clients.
My folder will contain only those things that only I can handle. And once all the systems are in place for managing other types of communications, these become fewer and fewer.
Triage
Once the folders are set up, Gemma is responsible for triaging all the emails that come through my inbox. She monitors the inbox and decides which folder each email should be placed in. 90% of the time, she’s able to act on the email. So, she manages it.
Another 10% of the time, I will need to take personal action on it. So, it’s placed in my "Jane to Action" folder.
The effect of this system is that I’m only ‘distracted’ from my daily client tasks and real work when it’s really important. And over all the burden of my inbox is lessened by about 90%. Even better, we both trust the system, which means that I can completely take my mind out of my inbox until I process my emails tomorrow morning.
In your own practice you will need to decide how and by whom your inbox is triaged. But the effect must be to take the mental load away from you so that you’re free to concentrate on the more important growth activity in your practice.
Respond
Your third and last task is to respond to those items that are in your “to action” folder. For most consultants the most efficient practice is to respond to emails once a day. Just block that time off in your calendar every day (or better yet, have your VA or EA block that time off for you!) and make it a habit to only work through your email folder during that time.
If you start to worry that you’re missing things, try to remember that the system is designed to catch anything urgent as well. And whoever is responsible for triaging your inbox will let you know when anything like that crops up. If you're struggling to get your EA to this stage process inbox together for a week, twice each day and it will be a great investment of your time for them to learn your patterns of communication and decision making, give feedback and built trust.
Continuous improvement
Like any system, inbox zero will improve over time, as you review and refine the process. In your daily team meetings make sure you talk about the things that aren’t working or could be improved in terms of managing your inbox.
Over time both you and your EA/VA/Business Manager will get better at the system. And this will take a task that is time consuming and onerous to helping you focus on what really matters most.