by Vicki Flaugher, CEO of SmartWoman Guides

I am a strong proponent of automation and process. It’s one of the holdovers I still have from working in the corporate world. From years of being a project manager and process control analyst, I care about the flow of information and how it’s handled. Process impacts how much time, money, and resources are needed to get things done. Flow can make things go fast and easy or bottleneck it all down to a slow crawl. 

More honestly, focusing on infrastructure is actually part of my personality. Call it a blessing or a curse, I tend to ask how things are done, to ask how I can eliminate waste and repetition, and to work to make things work in a smoother and more effortless way.

For the entrepreneur, systems are crucial. You have so much to do that it’s important that every minute is used wisely. And, you can’t work all the time – you have to figure out ways that allow you to accomplish what you need to, while allowing you to have a life. Rest and rejuvenation is not an option - it’s a requirement, especially when you are working hard. Besides, there are only 24 hours in the day and some of those hours are for eating, sleeping, showering, etc.  You have to leverage yourself.

Email can take a lot of your time. If you find you are answering the same questions over and over, or receiving a similar type of inquiry repeatedly, you can work to make your time more efficient with these easy suggestions.

Use email autoresponders that includes helpful links:

By establishing a welcome message that greets people when they sign up for your opt-in gift, or responds to a help inquiry immediately, you allow yourself some breathing room to respond to emails on your chosen schedule without neglecting your clients. I’m not suggesting that you push off answering your emails for too long, but rather that an autoresponder with a Frequently Asked Questions link can go a long way to giving customers the answers they need while you are blocking your time doing more pivotal things.

Also, if you find that your customers don’t reliably get their download gifts (perhaps due to pop up blockers) when they opt-in to your email list, it’s smart to include the link again in your thank you email, which gets triggered when they sign up in the first place. That way,  you don’t have to answer so many support questions about downloading issues because you give the client a second chance to retrieve their bonus via email.

One word of caution – it’s important to assign one specific, unique email for these inquiries, rather than putting an autoresponder on your regular, day-to-day email address. This is because an autoresponder will always answer back. If you mix autoresponder enabled email addresses with every day communication email addresses, you will be sending out the same message to people over and over and that’s not really that smart to do. It’s not personal enough and it’s annoying.

Use your email filtering feature to sort your incoming emails:

By automatically routing certain types of emails, either by subject or “from” address, you can take a lot of the hassle out of reviewing your email inbox. I sign up for many newsletters and I automatically filter those to their own specific folder.  That way, they are easily collected, without any intervention for me, and routed out of my active inbox so I don’t have to manually sort or decide everytime if I need to act upon them. These emails sit in their folder until I have time to get to them. They are rarely urgent but I like to read them, so with very little trouble I get them off my active desk so I can focus on what I have to do now instead.

The types of emails you could apply this system to are newsletters, invoicing and receipts, new signup logon info, personal blasts from your friends, and google alerts. The goal is to have only actionable items present in your inbox.

Use action based rather than topic based folders:

Sorting your emails by how urgent they are to act on is helpful in keeping you focused on getting things done. As an example, some categories would be Today, This Week, This Month, Reference. This method creates a basic to-do list for you that allows you to not get distracted by items that really should be pushed aside for awhile why you concentrate on the more important tasks.

Many business coaches suggest that you only check email once or twice a day rather than have it open all the time. One of my heroes, Tim Ferriss, goes even farther than that in his book The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich to suggest that, done right, you can do well by checking your email only once a week. Whereas you might not be ready to go that far with it, you could learn quite a bit by opening your mind to his ideas about delegation, outsourcing, and time management.

Another great book to help you is Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. It has been a real lifeline to me for organizing my work, including emails and folders. You might check it out if you feel you struggle with staying organized and prioritizing your time. I consider this one my business bible for organization and it has helped me tremendously. Check it out and see what you think.

Use these simple tips and work to get things done and to give yourself time to rest and relax with your family. That is in fact why we are working as entrepreneurs in the first place, right?

Together, we are stonger.
Vicki Flaugher, the original SmartWoman

follow me on Twitter: SmartWoman