Save Valuable Time: Automate Your Email Personal Use Ebook

Table Of Contents

The Email Problem 2
Solving the Problem 2
Identify Unwanted Email (SPAM) and Delete it Quickly 3
Handling Your Incoming Email 4
Automating Replies 8
Case Study 8
Three Types of Automation 9
Conclusion 15
Additional Resources 15

Sample Content Preview

The Email Problem

Problems or Challenges?

Actually there are many problems, but let’s focus on the main one – email is time-consuming.

How many hours per day do you spend managing and answering email?

If you kept an accurate record, you’d probably frighten yourself. Just highlighting and getting rid of spam every day takes me perhaps 10 minutes. If I spent another hour every day dealing with legitimate email and multiplied that by 365 days per year (yes, I really do check my email 365 days per year), my total annual commitment to email would be roughly 53 days. That’s assuming I work an eight hour day. That’s about six weeks out of your working year just to answer email.

Now, let’s be honest. You couldn’t automate all of your email and save yourself six weeks. However, even if you saved one week, wouldn’t it be worth it? Think of how many more pages you could add to your pet writing project in a week … or the clients you could talk with, advertisements you could write and so on.

We don’t want to get bogged down with numbers, but it’s healthy to reflect on the fact that you can spend a significant proportion of your work time on comparatively unproductive effort. The idea is to manage and automate your email system to get rid of as much of your unproductive effort as possible; you can then apply it to productive activities that generate money. After all, there are only 24h in your day … and my day … every day.