Everyone is going crazy with email these days. How’s yours? Is your inbox showing 9,999 new messages? Yeah that sucks. How do you keep up?
It’s tough. No doubt about it. But we think we might have a few ideas that could help make the emails a little easier to manage.
Most people receive emails from many different sources:
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Family and friends
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Business (think real estate) contacts
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Newsletters
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Social Media
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Companies you have done business with – like Amazon, eBay and Craigslist
Some of the emails you will want to see right away, and some you will never want to see. The trick is to use automation to organize your emails in such a way that you only see the ones you want, at the time you want. Here are some ways to do exactly that.
Set Up Several Email Addresses
These days with email services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, you can set up as many email addresses as you want, for free. Why not have one for each of the categories listed above?
Or better yet, have one for some of the categories above, and find ways to delete messages from other categories, such as social media. You can use features in these email accounts to automatically ‘sweep’ messages into the ‘trash’ file, or just block them altogether. Then you can just check your Facebook or Twitter page when you are ready.
Use an Email ‘Client’
Logging in and out of all those email addresses can become a pain in the rear. Wouldn’t you want to be able to see all of them in one place? That’s where programs like Microsoft Live Mail (the free version of Microsoft Outlook) or Mozilla Thunderbird come in handy. These programs allow you to:
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Consolidate all your email addresses into one list.
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Automatically create a copy of all your emails in case one of your accounts is hacked or goes down.
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Create rules to make going through your emails faster and easier.
What are ‘rules?’ Rules are what you set up in an email program so that it automatically organizes your email for you.
One example of rules would be setting up filters in your email…
Use Filters to Automatically Put Messages into Folders
Say you have an email address for newsletters. Using the major email services, you can set up ‘rules’ to automatically take emails from certain senders, and put it in the appropriate folders. Then you can read or search for those newsletters at another time.
Here are the links for setting up these different filters:
With folders you will only see the emails that you want to see right away. The others will be filed for future reading, for referencing or for deleting. Speaking of deleting, if you are deleting the messages from the same email address over and over again, wouldn’t it be nice just to not receive the email in the first place? Well you can do that…
Unsubscribe from (Almost) Everything
Say you are subscribed to a newsletter from some real estate investing ‘guru.’ But then you discovered the awesome content in Real Estate Mogul and realized you would never need any other real estate publication ever again..
You can go into each newsletter email and hit that little unsubscribe button at the bottom of the screen, but that takes a lot of time. Lots of emails ask you for feedback, or send you to another screen where you are trying to figure out which button to press.
Want to unsubscribe quickly?
How about just one email a day with all the newsletters you want to read?
There is a website called Unroll.Me that will scan your email box and list out all your subscriptions.
Once it shows you all the subscriptions, you can either choose to add the subscriptions to your ‘rollup’ or just unsubscribe from them. With one click you can unsubscribe.
The rollup function is really nice.
If you select ‘Add to Rollup,’ the site will create one email with all your subscriptions in it. That way your inbox will not get cluttered with a separate email for each newsletter. Even more importantly, you won’t miss an important email from someone else among all the clutter. You can also tell Unroll.Me whether you want your emails in the morning, afternoon or evening, by clicking on the ‘settings’ in the drop down next to your email address in the top right corner of the screen.
Besides Unroll.Me, it’s also good to have a strategy of what makes sense to keep in your subscriptions. If you have a LinkedIn group of investors that can buy your wholesale deals, you wouldn’t want to unsubscribe from that one. But do you really need to know right away that someone wrote something on your Facebook page?
Probably not.
Losing the subscriptions to the social media sites will probably help a lot. In fact, do you need a reminder right away that any email has come to your inbox? Don’t you think if it was that urgent, the person would call?
I don’t have A-D-D – oh Look – a Chicken
Psychologists have found that once you get distracted from a task, it takes about 25 minutes to refocus. That’s a lot of time wasted in a day. Maybe it’s time to turn off those annoying, distracting pop-ups that Outlook and Thunderbird put on the bottom of your screen whenever you get a new email in your inbox.
We understand that you can’t ‘steal in slow motion.’ When a real estate deal comes to you, you need to pounce quick. But honestly – those deals can wait an hour or so…
Otherwise you are checking your inbox 30 times a day instead of getting out there and prospecting for deals. Just check your inbox 2 or 3 times a day when you are between tasks and you will be far, far more productive.
To turn off the notifications in Microsoft Outlook, go here.
To turn it off in Thunderbird, go here.
Holla at us
Do you guys have other email productivity hacks? Please share them in the comments below.
Review Your Inbox – Are there ways to clean it up? Are you overwhelmed by the number of messages you receive? Look at ways to cut down, organize and clean up your inbox to make it clutter free.
Think Productivity – Besides email, look at your business as a whole. What are you wasting time on? What are you doing that is driving your results. Do more of the latter. Get rid of the former.
Communicate Better – Communication is key when you are managing a real estate business. Figure out if you are doing it well, and fix any problems.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.