Email can be such a pain.
I work with people who are drowning in bold, unread messages in their inbox. Their iPhone and iPad have different email than their home/office Mac. Or they have multiple email addresses; @hotmail, @gmail, @shaw, @yahoo, @theirbusiness… @chaos.
And my pet peeve… An email address like roberts.lucas379@gmail.com can be annoying and time-consuming to tell people every single time. Or maybe you’re still using something from the good ol’ party years, like shotgunner25@hotmail.com. 😉
Here are three steps to getting more free time with an email setup you’ll feel good about.
1. Think about the personal brand you want now and in the future.
If your email address is @gmail or @hotmail, then those companies own your email account. Not you. If that company ever decides to change something on their side, you’re at their mercy. Also, when you pick something like roberts.lucas379@gmail.com you’ll be repeating (and painstakingly spelling) the address hundreds of times per year.
Many of our clients go with their own family address, like jonesfamily.com or jonesclan.ca so the family members can have their own address. George would be george@jonesfamily.com and his wife Kate would be kate@jonesfamily.com.
They could also go for something more personal and stylish like g@georgejones.com and k@katejones.com. You can even get creative with the part before the @ symbol, like hello@georgejones.com or me@georgejones.com.
If you own a business, invest in the .com or .ca version of the business name so you can sound professional when you tell people your email address.
Your very own Internet real estate.
2. Forward and phase out the addresses you want to get rid of. Consolidate and simplify!
When you decide on the email addresses you’ll feel good about in 5-10 years, you can phase out and email-forward all the others. That way you will still get all the email to those addresses but over time people will learn your new one and update their address books.
If George has 4 email addresses: @gmail.com, @jonesmedia.com, @shaw.ca, and @me.com – he can register g@georgejones.com and forward his gmail.com, shaw.ca, and me.com into that one mailbox so he ends up with only two working email addresses;
george@jonesmedia.com (for his business) and g@georgejones.com (for his suitably-impressed friends)
You can set up a vacation auto-reply on the three you’re forwarding so people get a notice like “my email address has changed, please update your address book to g@georgejones.com.” After 6 to 24 months, when you know you’re not getting mail to the old address, you can delete it.
Once you’ve chosen the email addresses you want, get them working properly on all your devices. They should all send and receive perfectly and get you into the same messages (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, etc).
Going through all your online accounts and subscriptions to update your contact info takes some work. Use it as an opportunity to also improve security and round up your forgotten passwords.
3. Get that inbox to zero and unsubscribe from stuff you don’t actually read. I know it sucks, but it’s worth it.
I’m a huge fan of inbox-zero methodology. I’m not always able to maintain it, but when I do it’s nirvana. It takes a few hours over a week or two and then about 20 minutes a day focused maintenance.
To start the cleanup it really helps to sort your inbox by “From” so they’re all clumped together by sender. That way you can just delete the Facebook notices, newsletters you don’t want, and not-so-funny jokes forwarded from Aunt May all at once.
If a message is in your Inbox, that means it needs some kind of action from you. When it’s fully handled and complete, move it to a “Completed” folder. If it’s a newsletter or interesting article you want to refer to later, move it to a “Reference” folder. If you’ll need to follow up on something you delegated, move it to a “Pending” folder. If it doesn’t fit in one of those categories, delete it. If you don’t actually read it, unsubscribe. No mercy. No regrets. Total freedom.
Great for working through your pack-rat tendencies and emotional attachments to things you “surely will need in the future”.
We both know you’ll never go back and read them. 😉
Thanks Lucas. This was very helpful. I hope you will continue to publish information like this.
Great advice! Very useful. Kind of ironic that the link to this came in my email;-)
You are wise my friend, thank you for the sound e-advice. You rock!