Lisa Hendrickson is the owner of Call That Girl. She is an Outlook Expert and Microsoft 365 Consultant.
I wake up everyday and first thing I do is check my Blackberry to review what email I got over night. I know it’s an addiction at this point, so you don’t need to tell me that. I am aware of it. If they had a Blackberry anonymous group, I would probably go!
Lately though, I have noticed how much email I have been getting a day and realized that I needed to start getting it under control. It was at around 150! And since I am running a business, I would spend each evening organizing and replying to all of these emails. Very exhausting. The idea of starting to use rules and subfolders for my email is something that a professional organizer would probably want to do for me, so I stepped up and started doing it myself.
Here is what I have been doing, and it’s a process. You have to do it almost everyday to make it work. I have noticed results and it’s getting better. I woke up to 2 emails today instead of 20.
First let’s start with this.
Today, only answer the important emails. The business critical ones, the ones that really need to be answered. Let the rest go, do not move them or delete them or anything. Just let them sit.
Tomorrow morning will be when the work starts. If you are like me, you probably wake up to 20 emails, mostly all the newsletters and updates you have subscribed to. I got to the point, it was annoying and wanted them gone. Just sick of them and needed them organized or to not come to me anymore.
Tomorrow am: Open each email with a directive thought. Here are a few examples of my emails.
Next, create a subfolder in your email program to reflect these needs. Then move all of those emails to those folders with the exception of the newsletters.
Once your email is organized a bit, then attack the newsletters. I started unsubscribing from newsletters that I didn’t want anymore and then created a rule for ALL newsletters to go to. I want to read them, just not today. I prefer to read through them on weekends when I have time. So now I know where those are. My email inbox is now pretty clean and in just 3 days, I have already noticed a big change! I love it!
I am by far not a professional organizer, but this was pretty easy for me to get going with, took a few minutes a day and well worth it. Trust me, I had the feeling of living on the edge of my inbox and now I’m not feeling it so much. Yes, I’m still addicted to the Blackberry and yes, I still check emails every morning, but now I feel better I don’t have to clean up so many emails when I get on the computer.
whew!
This past week, this was our client work load…Norton causing computer crashes, usb ports going wonky, Microsoft Security Essentials disappearing, two new computer set ups, Belkin router set up issues, viruses, gotomeeting.com not working, slow computers, Macintosh training and a few Outlook calls. Most of these problems, with the exception of the usb ports going bad were all software repair. Even the usb ports issue was somewhat of a software issue because the port issue caused the operating system to crash, and I had to fix that first to figure out what was wrong with the computer. I got it fixed to the point I could get the user’s data and find out, the usb ports were crashing when plugging in power related external camera’s or hard drives. Keyboards and mice were fine.
Many people are quite shocked to learn that we are a software business, but it makes sense when you figure 90% of computer related problems are due to software not working right. Hardware is also so cheap to just replace, many folks don’t want to pay $200+ to fix a motherboard (the hardware inside your computer) when getting a new computer is just about that cheap. Is that the way to go? Sometimes, on older computers I would say yes.
There are many things going on inside your computer in regards to hardware. Many years ago, hardware was easy and fairly cheap to replace. These days, some issues are not so cheap to fix as some of things inside your computer are working together. If one thing breaks, you must replace many things.
Why we are staying out of hardware…because there are enough hardware repair businesses out there. I am good at software, the market is there, the software problems are there, so why not do what I do well and focus on that. My competition doesn’t understand how I can survive off software, but in all reality, it makes sense.
What is software? Any programs on your computer that you use to enjoy your computer time. Your internet, office programs, cameras and printers, Gmail, Hotmail, antivirus, Firefox, Facebook..the list could go on and on.
A few answers for you…
Please consider Call That Girl next time you have a computer glitch or something is going wrong. If the computer boots up, it’s something we can tackle!
Now that some time has passed, I think I can tell this story without feeling that the person I am speaking about will read this and figure out it’s them I am speaking of. This story could be anyone, in any town, in any state. But because it happened in my town, where I network, and where I work, I had to let time go before telling this great story of how auto-fill let me in on a little secret. (What is auto-fill you may ask? It’s the little tool in your email that remembers all the people you have emailed, it “fills in” in their email address once you start typing it in).
Once upon a time an account executive from a Minneapolis business tried to get CTG to become a referring partner. They found me on LinkedIn, told me they LOVED my business and asked me out for coffee, I refused of course because I don’t do coffee dates anymore. They persisted and offered to come to my office if I would have a few minutes. Ok, I can do that for a fan (and I sometimes accept if someone will come to my office for a few minutes to pitch something that I may need). During our meeting, we discussed an upcoming instrustry change and maybe becoming friends outside of work “we get a long so great, we should hang out!” type of conversations began. Hey I’m a social person and I love making new friends, so I said yes to happy hour and yes to making a new friend. Then the day of our get together they cancelled. Not a big deal. Then they cancelled again. I was starting to get irritated and wondered what happened. Then started the fun emails, more chat about the industry changes coming up, calls to keep me on the line, etc. Never met again in person. But what I did notice was this person had slowly received information out of me that I had good insight on in the industry and like a friend…I trusted them with it.
Moving ahead, they slowly lost contact with me after I shared most of the good industry tips I had. Then one day, I got an interesting email that was sent to their entire sales team and I was listed as a sales team member. Wrong Lisa I guess (thus my reference to Auto-fill). I read the whole sales pitch/proposal and found a lot of my “good tip’s” from this executive in the email giving out to their team all of the things I told them. Now, none of these were secrets by any means, all public knowledge, but for us in the industry, it was information that not a lot of folks knew about back then.
Was I ticked off? Yes. I wrote that person back and said, “You didn’t get it ALL accurate” LOL! I am quite sure that they about shit their pants when they noticed I was cc’d because I can tell you this much, I should not have been copied on that email. I still crack up thinking about it. Never heard back from that person ever again. There are a lot of lessons to this story and the one I want to remind you of is remembering the auto fill feature when sending out emails (double check names! Auto-fill is so easy to just grab the first “Lisa” on the list), there are some other lessons here but I’ll let you figure those out for yourself.
Happy Monday!
Lisa
Oops, sorry to my subscribers. I meant for this to be a page at the top!
Enjoy your Sunday, it’s raining here in Minnesota AGAIN. Catching up on website stuff:)
