If you can master email rather than letting it master you, you’ll have more time to grow your business.
Email can be great for serving customers and listening to their needs. However, it can also drain time and energy and distract business owners and entrepreneurs.
Email is generally the source of most customer queries. How can you stay on top of things without email distracting you from the other work that needs to get done?
Reactive mode
Mobile phones allow us to respond to any message anytime, anywhere. But increasingly our mobile phone notifications are driving our agenda for the day. How many days have you set out a plan, then worked non-stop all day only to finish with none of your intended tasks done?
Constant notifications from email and other social media apps cause constant distractions from the work we plan to do.
Deep thinking
Tasks like writing quotes or proposals require a deep level of concentration. To get this level of focus, we need to work uninterrupted.
The statistics on our ability to focus are alarming. If we are distracted by a notification, it can take up to 23 minutes to get back to the same level of focus (Ref1). And this occurs even if we only switch away for 30 seconds.
Business owners are great multitaskers and get lots of things done. But this research shows that the quality of decision-making and creativity is really diminished. It can be viewed as skimming rather than genuinely working.
Try something new
Email is generally the biggest distracter so let’s look at a strategy to take control.
There is no point in telling business owners to work with their notifications switched off. How about a strategy that allows you to stay in touch throughout the day while gaining uninterrupted time every hour for deep-thinking productive work?
“Think of what you can achieve in
