Recently I handed over two personal/business email accounts over to an assistant. Keep in mind that I already have someone answering support emails and handling customer service. None of these emails had any support issues unless our customer support assistant couldn’t resolve the issue.
Most of the emails in these two accounts were subscriptions, friends, interview requests, alerts and stuff like that.
I spent one week recording myself as I went through my inbox. Narrating my thought process on each email. My assistant reviewed them, asked a few questions and we’re all set.
One thing I noticed however is… I don’t need all those alerts. Neither does she since I’m paying her to review them. I’m not talking about Google Alerts and stuff like that – we will discuss that a tad later. What I’m talking about are: Forum reply notifications. That was a biggie. I had no idea I was getting so many of those and only from one or two forums where I co-coach at. Wow.
Then there were comment reply alerts. There are two types. The ones you get when you check that box to notify you of replies on other peoples’ blog – junk them. You really don’t need to know and they suck up your time like crazy.
The second type are the ones that come from your own blogs – I used to think this is important. I mean people say you should be responding to your blog comments regularly right?
That is true. You should to keep the connection. But I think you don’t have to respond the very minute after someone comments. Instead, schedule a time into your week where you do visit your blog to respond to comments.
Back to Google Alerts. What I’ve done so far is automatically archive and label them in Gmail. But think this will change soon. You gotta admit, there’s a lot of junk in these alerts. I’ll be training my assistant to review these for me to spot anything interesting or important. You can also subscribe to search phrases via RSS. Something I’ve done myself. But still think this is something I can outsource.
What unnecessary time gobbling alerts do you have that you could shave off?
