Free Yourself! get creating instead of doing office work

Here are some more additional thoughts that I suggest you may want to implement if you are finding your creative time being enveloped by outside forces – usually your inbox!

• Thread your emails

By keeping your correspondence with a client within the same thread, you seriously reduce your search time later and you can easily verify previously disclosed information. Consider a new thread for a new project with the same client.

• Forward all personal stuff to your personal email

Don’t even read it (unless it’s your Mom, children or significant other, of course, but not if it’s a forward) Just forward it to your personal email which you only check when you’re on personal time.

This is probably the hardest one to do. I love checking out all that cool stuff too as well as checking out other people’s work but 2 hours just slip away so easily and then you’re not sleeping well for a couple of days like a college student all over again and you never get to the gym or get to do all the other things that help keep you sane.

Have you ever filled out an order form for a mail catalog back in the day when we all mailed in our orders? Well, I started the practice of waiting a week or two before mailing it and a funny thing happened – about 30 more things that I wanted even more showed up in following catalogs or my car broke down and I needed that money. It wasn’t important to me at all three weeks later. If you start doing this, you’ll find those emails weren’t really that important at all. They just sucked your time and took away your earning power. Surf them for the next snowstorm or attack of insomnia.

• Walk Away

It’s my job to sit at the computer all day (minus trips to the post office), read emails, label them, etc. but that is not how most of you make your money. That’s how you lose money.

One of my goals as a Studiomomager is to have my clients open their email to find it all labeled. Colors pop out at them right away and they know immediately where to place their energies. Mundane tasks and repetitive responses are done for them but most people are doing this themselves in addition to their RPA’s.

Schedule the times you look at your email and don’t stop what you’re doing every time you hear that little ding. If you are expecting an important email, use the forwarding feature of your email program to forward emails with filters you applied to your phone and step away from the computer or, are you ready for this, close your email program if you have to stay on the computer.

Utilizing filters only allows emails with the criteria you’ve determined (certain email addresses, subject lines or key words) will be forwarded to your phone. When your phone dings/rings/beeps, then you stop your work only for the important client/event. You’ll miss all the junk email and have uninterrupted creative time.

I log all my time for my clients in a spreadsheet because I contract by the minute, with a one hour minimum/wk. It is an eye-opening document at times when you see how little time is actually needed in a response, labeling emails, etc. Occasionally, I have labeled and responded to all a client’s emails in less than 10 minutes spread throughout the day even though my clients profess it took up far more of their day before I arrived. It’s the same amount of mail they always received but they can immediately see that they may have 75 emails but only 4 of them are related to client issues. I don’t care about reading their junk emails (well, some of them I do. You guys get some really cool stuff/websites). I usually just label them or I’ll never get to workout either.

• Use your Phone

Sometimes you can save yourself a multitude of emails by just picking up the phone to clarify things not easily communicated in an email. We all have umbilical cords to our cell phones so the chances are probably pretty good that the person you are trying to reach is near their cell phone too.

• Create Snippets

 I like using the program Text Expander (see my previous blog – The Inception App) for the ability to quickly add a line to an email or the entire body of the email with fields I can fill in to customize to that customer.

All I have to do is type a few letters and my text/picture/link pops up. Bam! Hit send after you fill in the fields to customize the email. I can create a snippet for my address, a snippet for a thank you letter with open fields for names and items purchased, a signature snippet, a snippet for a tracking information letter with the open fields being the date of shipment, tracking number and the customer’s name, and so on and so on.

You can put a snippet inside a snippet inside a snippet not unlike a dream in the movie Inception only it’s far safer and a lot easier to fix if you screw up. Make a change on one of those buried snippets and all the other saved email forms are changed immediately if they have that snippet in it. See, kind of like the movie!

Create snippets for all your auto response-like emails and all the verbiage you find yourself repeating. You’ll make fewer mistakes too, just make sure the original has been proofed a few times. The program is very affordable; you can try the demo for 30 days and take the very short tutorials that’ll have you up and running in less than 15 minutes, my kind of program!

• Use Google Docs

Not everybody has Microsoft Office Suite but everybody has access to Google Docs if you have a Gmail account. You can create documents that you use for pasting into snippets and can share these and other documents with clients/coworkers/employees. Everybody is literally on the same page and if you’re computer crashes, you haven’t lost anything because it’s stored in cloud technology. You may want to share the page but withhold editing capabilities from some of the people you share with.

If a client can check a spreadsheet/document on his/her own to see notes that you’ve added regarding a project without having to email you at every step, everybody wins! Respect the Cloud! My clients can see if I emailed their customers or if I sent them the tracking numbers or what time I’ve invested on their behalf, all without ever emailing or speaking with me. We only have to communicate over issues that I require input for. Even this can be communicated with a red colored cell formatted by me in a spreadsheet awaiting input from my client when they are ready to step away from their work/passion. This way, I don’t have to bug them all day with questions, distracting them from their projects.

Personal story: My son in college came home for the weekend with his USB flash drive loaded with an important unfinished paper written in MSWord. He planned to finish writing the paper here so I could proofread it as he created it. Whoops! My laptop didn’t have MSWord. The next time he visited, I did have access to MSWord but he forgot the flash drive. Ugh! He’s a Google Docs user now!

• Discourage family & friends from using your work email

If you do this, you have automatically reduced and labeled a portion of the email piling up in your inbox. The email about all the ways you can use Bounce is really useful but doesn’t belong in your work inbox. It belongs in the personal email account with the really cool 3-D chalk drawings that guy did on the sidewalks.

Open separate email accounts if you haven’t done so already and be somewhat of a dictator about it with the friends and relatives you love to spend time with but drain your earning capacity with their interruptive but thoughtful communications. Consider opening an email account just for clients. Suppliers, advertisers and everybody else can send emails elsewhere and get checked far less frequently. Now you know that you have to check the client email account first everyday, another way of automatically labeling important client communications but should be unnecessary if you are following steps 1 and 2 regularly.

• Unsubscribe!

Rather than keeping an email from your favorite seller in your inbox, mark their website in your browser favorites and unsubscribe from the daily distracting newsletter. Stop the flow of the river of emails! If you really want something from them or really need something, you can just go to your bookmarks folder. I’ll bet you spend less money this way because you probably didn’t even know you needed that item until they emailed you. Venture out and discover new inventions, toys, concerts, etc. when you really need that item rather than when the advertiser thinks you need them.

Most of us work so that someday we won’t have to work! Every email you waste time with and every advertising email you make a purchase from pushes that date further and further back so be selfish with your time and your money.

You may love your work enough to do it forever but your body or life may have other plans for you. Having worked in the financial services industry, I am very focused on risk management and relying on the ability to work long hours for many years is too risky for your physical and financial health. Now, there’s your free mom advice from Studiomomager.