How To Delegate Email Management and Bring Calm to the Chaos of your Inbox
We’ve all experienced that feeling. We’ve been so busy dealing with all the hot issues at the top of our inbox, that we don’t manage to make it through the rest of it. This creates unnecessary stress and anxiety by not knowing what we have waiting for us. As a CEO, it’s extremely important to not only acknowledge email correspondence, but to also respond to those messages in a timely fashion. You want to ensure you maintain a professional relationship with your existing and prospective clients through your email communications.
In part one of this blog series, which aims to help you uncover and understand where you can delegate tasks, we talked about how to delegate document management without losing control. In today’s blog, we’re going to focus on how you can delegate your email management. You'll finally be able to clear your inbox, and your mind, so that you can put your primary focus where it should be, on your business.
Your inbox is more than just a place to keep your emails. Regardless of what email system you use, there are many other helpful tools and resources available within the software. It may seem scary to give even partial control of your inbox to someone else, but trust me when I say that it is one of the best decisions that you’ll make. Oftentimes, we think that email management is a task that we must face alone, but that just is not the case! Here’s a few ways reducing the burden of email management through delegation can help you.
Organization
The organization of your inbox is essential. Are you an offender that has all your emails in your main inbox folder with zero organization? It’s ok if you are! So many of us today are too busy with our responsibilities that keeping on top of and organizing our inboxes can seem daunting.
Having someone to set up and organize your inbox will assist you in so many ways. Creating an easy to identify subfolder structure will help make your inbox seem less overwhelming. Introducing labels into your inbox can also help sort and group like communications based on topic. Adding in filters can immediately move emails by subject or sender into these dedicated labels and folders. There will be no more searching your inbox and wading through 100 emails from “Joe” to find the one you want. Creating an organizational system, and having someone help manage it for you on a daily basis, will give you the freedom of knowing exactly what is, and isn’t, in your inbox and what requires your immediate attention.
Reminders/Tasks
We all wish we had our own project manager sometimes to help keep us on task. We have scribbles on notebooks and post it notes and emails to ourselves to remind us to do things. But did you know that you can also utilize your email system to help you with reminders and tasks for important deliverables?
Having someone help manage your emails means that they can also set up reminders and tasks for you. If you need to prepare something for a meeting, a reminder can be set up a few days in advance to notify you to start working on said task. It’s not about adding extra time into your already busy day, but about reminding you of the critical things you need to do in any given day or week. Let someone help you take the tasks that result from incoming emails and translate them into reminders.
Now, let’s go one step further beyond organization and deliverables. You’ve decided to allow someone to help manage your inbox. But have you considered having them help respond to some of your emails? For some, this thought can be frightening. But here’s the truth, you can use your email management system to streamline and bring consistency to your responses.
Standardized Templates and Automations
As a CEO, it’s important to focus on the most critical items in your inbox, not everything. Do you have common emails that come in? Do you have standard responses that you send often? If so, consider setting up basic standardized email templates. By having canned responses, and having someone to help assist you, they can respond to basic emails using these standardized templates.
Going one step further beyond just creating templates and canned responses, you can also consider automating some of those responses. There are ways to set up Rules and Automations within your inbox so that if an email is sent from a certain address or with certain keywords, you can have an automated response go directly to the sender.
Using canned responses and automations means both you and the person managing your inbox will spend less time with easily answered emails and provide consistency of information to clients. You’ll look professional and free up valuable time by not having to engage in that first exchange of information.
I hope that this month’s blog has given you some ideas on how delegating email management can not only free up your time to focus on your business, but also help you maintain your professional appearance with current and prospective clients. Email management is a powerful tool for CEOs, and delegating this to someone who excels in this area will leave you feeling in control and far less stressed.
If you find yourself struggling with who to delegate these tasks to you, or you are a one-person show, let’s have a chat! At ROSAPEL, we have been working with our clients to help bring calm to the chaos of email management for over 35 years. Our proven methodologies will simplify your life, enhance your business, and maintain the level of professionalism that you require. We’ve been making business owners look and operate as the true professional CEO’s they are. Need it done? We’re the one!
