By Kip Gregory
A few months ago, I began coaching Frank (not his real name), a 25-year industry veteran and owner of a successful advisory practice. Frank makes a comfortable mid-six-figure income and has a team of professionals and support staff helping him run his business. But he’d hit a wall in terms of his personal productivity; he was increasingly bogged down in nonrevenue-producing “administrivia” that was preventing him from doing what he enjoyed most—bringing in assets. One of the worst culprits was email.
Early in the coaching process, Frank shared that he was chewing up one-and-a-half to two hours a day fielding 150 or more new messages. He also revealed that he had close to 2,000 messages clogging his in-box, some dating back more than a year. Wasn’t there something he could do to better control his message flow, he asked?
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Email rules act like a squad of traffic cops, directing messages where you want them to go. |
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There was. And during a pair of follow-up web conferences, I taught Frank and his assistant some simple ways to eliminate the backlog of email and keep his in-box clear of clutter. These included setting up folders, creating rules to automatically direct messages where he wanted them, color-coding messages from important contacts and doing a better job of shielding Frank from spam.
Rules rule
Frank’s not unique. Everywhere I go, I encounter advisors wrestling with the same challenge. And not surprisingly, few have a long-term strategy for coping with the overload, beyond ignore and delete. If this sounds familiar, try this approach: Learn how to use rules to filter incoming messages so you can separate what you need to see now (client information) from what you’d like to see later (newsletters, product updates) or not be bothered with at all (spam).
Email rules act like a squad of traffic cops, directing messages where you want them to go. To set up a rule in Microsoft Outlook, select Tools from the main menu, then choose Rules Wizard. You’ll be given the choice of working from a predefined template or starting a blank rule. I find it easier to work with blank rules and build from the bottom up, but you may like using the templates. Either way, the Wizard will walk you through a process of:
- deciding which conditions you want to check for (e.g. messages from a certain person or address, or with specific content)
- telling Microsoft Outlook what to do with the message (e.g. move it to a separate folder, delete it or notify you with a special alert)
- identifying any exceptions
- giving the rule a name and activating it
Using this approach, Frank and his assistant set up a handful of rules to manage his messages and cut the number of new emails he had to respond to daily by nearly 90 percent—from more than 150 to fewer than 20. More importantly, he freed up nearly an hour a day to invest in more productive activity and regained a greater sense of control over communications with clients, prospects and others.
If you’re fighting the same battle to increase your productivity, implementing a set of email rules will help you recapture lost time almost instantly—time you can devote to developing new clients and providing better service to existing ones.
Establishing rules to help manage email is just one more high ROI use of technology you already own. Simple, but incredibly powerful.
For more tips like this one, sign up for Kip Gregory’s monthly e-newsletter Kip’s Tips.
Used with permission. All rights reserved.
Kip Gregory, principal of The Gregory Group and author of Winning Clients in a Wired World, is a consultant, trainer and speaker on marketing, sales and technology issues for the financial services industry. Contact him at 202-364-6913 or at www.kipgregory.com.
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