Random musings

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Delegate

You can give somebody permission to go into your email inbox and reply or forward your emails for you, although this is not what I'm specifically talking about today. But if you're interested in turning over some or all of your email responsibilities, then you might want to talk to a virtual assistant. To find out more you can contact my friend, Michele Reynolds, at www.successtroops,com. Or you can contact her via email at michele@successtroops.com. I know there are others out there and if you offer an email management service leave a comment below.

What I'm talking about is giving a particular email to a particular person to follow up for you. If your boss, a co-worker or your assistant can handle the email as well as, or better than, you...pass it on. However, don't just pass it off on someone, be sure to let them know that you want them to handle this particular email for you.

Remember our process from Monday:

Delete, if you don't need to reply or forward, or if you don't need it for reference, delete it!
If you need to take an action with the email, then delegate it to someone else if possible.
Do it - if it'll take two minutes or less
Defer it

This is what my iPhone looked like when I went to sleep:

No Mail! I moved all of my old emails into a folder called "Need to go through", except for my Gmail account where it's called "Stuff". I may rename it to something better, but that's what it is for now.

When I woke up, this is what things looked like:

I had a total of 21 emails. After unsubscribing from 8 or 10 emails and deleting others, I had 3 emails left. Since none of them were delegatable (is that even a word?), I had 3 emails left. One took about 30 seconds to respond to (Do) and 2 were more involved and I deferred them.

Tomorrow, we'll talk about handling your remaining emails immediately.