As a self-employed marketer, I have lived and died by email for the past 10 years. It’s been at the center of my business and personal life for everything from sales to socializing. But over the past year or two, the daily flow of email has become totally unmanageable. Something had to be done. I took bold action. So why do I feel guilty?
My incoming email is down to a trickle since I added this autoresponder:
Dear colleagues & friends: I am checking email only a couple of times a day because I am totally overwhelmed with unnecessary emails.
So, if something is pressing, please call me.
If not, understand that I will be back to you in hours rather than minutes.
Thank you!
B.L.
Notice that I did not include my phone number because it is easily available on my blog and my site and I don’t want junk phone calls either. But jeez, what if I never read that one email with the life-changing client inquiry?
I identified completely with John Gruber at Daring Fireball, joining the rising tide when he wrote about email bankruptcy:
“My habits and message filing strategies had more or less remained the same for the entire 15 years I’d been using email. My problem … is that I now receive far, far more email than I could possibly deal with using my long-established strategies and habits.”
Taking what he, Merlin Mann, James Duncan Davidson and others have recommended, here’s what I’ve done besides add the autoresponder: I created a system.
o I turned off the sound that signals incoming emails.
o I check it first thing in the morning.
o I respond, delete or file immediately and delete the rest, unread.
o I repeat this procedure only three or four more times a day instead of continually.
o Unsubscribing to publications has had no effect, so I junk the ones I don’t want.
o I ignore emails that don’t have a compelling subject line.
o I don’t go through the “junk” folder for things mistakenly caught there.
o i figure, if it’s important, it’ll come again. Or the person will call me.
And yet, I feel guilty. I feel rude. I wonder if some potential business has been lost because I sound un-accomodating.
And now that there’s less email, I keep thinking I’m going to miss something.
Oy vey.
This picture could have been me until Monday:
This is me now:
(OK, so I have more than one email account, but my Gmail inbox is empty.) /em>
Copyright B.L. Ochman, All rights reserved.
B.L.
this is really good. I don’t nearly as many e-mails as you do but still, they are a real pain. I have just started to unsubscribe from certain newsletters, only because I find myself deleting them anyway. If I want to read it, I can go directly to the site.
I think your autoresponder is awesome and have recently thought about doing something like that except that I would want it to go to certain people that e-mail me and not everyone. Is this rude? Can you do that?
Kristen – in gmail you can send an autoresponse only to people in your contacts if you want.
frankly, it might be rude, but it works. people are calling.
i have clients where i deal with 3 or 4 people, each of whom can generate 20 emails a day, and that’s just nuts. 99% of it would be better handled on the phone.
so i am trying this and so far, it is working.
Wow… that’s what gmail looks like when it’s empty? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that….
I need to pick up some of your email tips. Keeping up with my 3 gmail accounts all-day could be a full-time job in itself.
For the publications that you don’t want, but can’t seem to unsubscribe to… you could just setup a filter for them, and have them immediately archived (skipping your inbox). I do that with a lot of catalogs…
Don’t feel guilty! I haven’t resorted to the auto-responder yet, but I have a system that is pretty similar. I do check my junk file every few days, because I have lost a few important emails in my insanely aggressive filter.