If you want to learn all the ins and outs of using email to your every advantage, you'll love this week's podcast, where we interview productivity specialist and host of the podcast Productivity Straight Talk, Amber de le Garza.
Amber is a sought after Speaker, Trainer, and Business Efficiency Consultant whose clients include small business owners to multinational corporations. Amber works with business owners and entrepreneurs to give them her tried and true productivity training and consulting. After spending some fifteen years in the realty business, Amber has turned her expertise to consulting, while hosting her podcast and blog.
In this episode, Amber walks us through the tricks of the trade to process emails even faster and more efficiently. First, she recommends turning off those notifications during the work-day, and blocking out an uninterrupted time to process emails, maybe once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
When we finally get a chance to sit and skim those emails, she recommends embracing the opportunity to take action, by enacting one of 5 Simple Email Decisions, meaning you:
Delete
Forward
Reply
Schedule
File
It's beautifully simple and I can't wait to put her advice to work. If the stats are true -- that business email users received and sent an average of 44,000 emails per year -- I would be curious if broadcasters receive even more! Between press releases, media lists, interviews, and all those incoming scheduling revisions, I know my inbox is a total mess.
I was around when e-mail arrived on the scene, back when it was less about spam and e-mail marketing and more about literally corresponding with co-workers. Slowly, people in the office stopped walking around to actually converse with each other. They began to just e-mail and CC one another; and in instances of the truest passive aggressive behavior, you might even blind CC the CEO. Far from saving paper, I swear, since the advent of e-mail, offices now use over three times the paper – that is, unless your station uses Promosuite!