Posts Tagged ‘Lauren Halagarda’

Email Is Killing Productivity For You and Your Clients

Friday, July 31st, 2009

Email is is a productivity killer and nearly everyone feels the pain from email. Think about this for a second….

  • 50 emails a day
  • Times 4 minutes typing up a response
  • That over 3 hours each day to email.  (And 50 is quite conservative.) 
  • Factor that number into 5 days a week 
  • Times 50 work weeks a year = over 866 hours spent on email. 
  • That’s almost 22 weeks dedicating totally lost to email!  Holy cow! 

Can you see where all your time is going?  A Red Bench, recently had a fantastic teleclass with fellow organizer and email expert, Lauren Halagarda,   It was called Detox Your Inbox and one of the questions was how much time should we really be spending with email.   Using Lauren’s process she shared on the teleclass she said you can process about 60 emails in 20 minutes.  I was blown away by that.  How long do you think it’s taking you to process 60 emails?

Here are some suggestions both from the Teleclass and some of my own practices that have become very helpful. 

  • Process email twice a day or in micro bursts rather than in real time
  • Shut off email arrival sounds and the “new mail”
  • Use your calendar and tasks features
  • Send fewer emails
  • Send better emails

Think of your own clients who could benefit from using email more effectively. How can you incorporate this into your services and make a huge difference for your clients.  To purchase Detox Your Inbox, visit the Audio Recordings page of our website and consider attending a future A Red Bench Teleclass. 

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A Saved Email Is Only Helpful If You Can Find It

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

We had a fantastic teleclass with fellow organizer and email expert, Lauren Halagarda, recently.  It was called Dexox Your Inbox and one of the questions was whether she recommends using email folders for archiving. Now with all of our teleclasses you have to take the expert’s advise as just that – advice.  You can take it or leave it, but do give it some thought.  You have to listen to the teleclass to understand the entire context of her recommendation, but interestingly enough Lauren does not recommend archiving your emails using folders. 

She says “saving email is only helpful if you can find the email and the folders become overwhelming and confusing.”  Lauren recommends after processing your email, and she provides a process to do so on the teleclass, to archive emails in one folder.  Then use search sofware to retrieve information quickly.  She reviewed various search software tools on the call including her preferred software recommendation.   

Now, I know for many of you this may be a big change and seem like and odd recommendation.  I know for myself, I do like having a personal folder, a folder for my organizing company and one for A Red Bench.  I can still use the search tool she recommends making retrieval easy. But as I was listening to her I started thinking about a recent client who is an attorney and has to save every client communication.  Having one folder will help her tremendously, because right now she cannot stay on top of archiving them and the volume does not allow her to find anything. 

Think of your own clients where this one folder recommendation, along with a search tool, could save them time and frustration. To purchase Detox Your Inbox, visit the Audio Recordings page of our website and consider attending a future A Red Bench Teleclass.

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Posted in Organizing Skills, Teleclasses, Time Management | 1 Comment »

One Step To A Reduced Email Inbox

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

computerIf you know me, or have read other my personal blog posts, then you know I am not a huge fan of email.  Now, before you freak out of course I understand the benefits of email and do enjoy communicating using email on certain occasions.  My problem with email is that you would never call me 10 different times, but you wouldn’t think twice about emailing me 10 times.  As a business owner, I was overwhelmed by how much email I receive that I am supposed to deal with, right?  I just could not keep up so I reviewed my email.  What was I really getting?  Much of the email I receive had no benefits to my life or business whatsoever.  Its information, its an FYI, or even more fun, a series of Reply All’s from various group I belong to.  (My personal favorite waste of time.) 

So I have been conducting a little experiment.  In an effort to reduce the amount of emails in my inbox, I have been trying to reduce the amount of emails I send.   I read somewhere for every one email you send, you receive three back.  And if you receive 100 emails each day and each takes 3 minutes to deal with, that’s five hours of your day.  No wonder we can’t get anything done!   So I send much less and am very aware of who I am sending to.  I only respond if I must and delete aggressively.  My goal by the end of the day in Zero Inbox, but usually I have around 10.   

What I can tell you is it has be fantastic not to have that panic feeling of all the emails I have to read and deal with in my inbox.   Just like everything else, you have to pick and choose; I choose to only respond to the most necessary, important emails.  We are looking forward to much more information on this Email Overload on our July 8th Teleclass with Lauren Halagarda.  Topic is DeTox Your Inbox.  Register today!

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Posted in Grow Your Business, Organizing Skills, Time Management | 1 Comment »

NAPO Conference Recap Day #5

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

It’s Saturday; the first day without the expo hall and as great as the booth, was we are both happy not to have the booth today.  I don’t believe my feet could have taken another day and now we can focus on the classes and soak it all in.  So glad because the day was amazing!

Our morning got started with a bang attending the session “How We Make Our Lifestyle Businesses Work” with Debbie Gilster and Dorothy Breininger.  Everyone knows about these two ladies and they are outstanding.  They are always so honest and forthcoming with their information and it was truly packed solid.  I loved every minute of this session; it was worth the entire trip!  Angela and I consider ourselves lifestyle entrepreneurs and what that means is our businesses fit our lifestyle.  Angela is a Mom with two kids and I love to spend time with my husband and hope to be a Mom.  Neither one of us wants to work evening or weekends, we want to work smarter, not harder, we want to earn passive income and not be controlled by our businesses.  Many business owners are working all the time, checking email 50 times per day, answering the phone or a text in the middle of the night and are at the beckon call to their business.  That is not a lifestyle entrepreneur.  But when you say these things out loud, some people really shun this concept.  I hear all the time, “how you could not check email more than once per day.  I will do a separate post on being a lifestyle entrepreneur, but here are few things I learned which I found so validating. 

  • Be clear on what you want
  • Create me time.
  • Create very clear niche for yourself.
  • Limit the amount of information you allow in. 
  • Create boundaries

More to come on this topic, but I was so appreciative of the information shared.  Sometimes I feel because I don’t want to work around the clock that I am not a good business owner.  I just want to have balance in my life and enjoy everyday.  Like my Dad always says, “On your death, you won’t want to spend one more day at the office.”

My second session of the day was the panel with two A Red Bench experts on; Krista Green and Carson Tate.  The panel was called “The Many Different Ways Of Doing Business.” Now, I don’t do much hands-on organizing so a great deal of the information did not necessary apply to me, but I did love hearing about the different models; I had so ideas some of them existed and I feel more knowledgeable about them.  I especially loved hearing from Krista about the expansion vs. leverage model.  That is where we are; leverage the work you’ve already done and I am always excited to hear more on this topic. 

My final session of the day was with another A Red Bench speaker and it was also fantastic.  It was called Balance or Burnout with the Pam McCutcheon.  I have been known to have burn out from time to time so I really wanted to hear some solutions for both me and my clients.  The class was very informative and interactive.  I learned I need to face and deal with what stresses me out before it can be addressed. 
 
Also on Friday was the Awards luncheon and the closing keynote with author Micheal Port (the keynote was very disappointing so we’ll just skip that altogether.) Congrats to A Red Bench member Lauren Halagarda for winning an award for the website committee and to Denslow Brown for winning the Founder’s Awards. 

The day ended with dinner in the lobby with colleagues and friends.  Overall, a great end to the day.

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