Guide to Outsourcing Personal Email Management

mail Again y hat if you never had to check e-mail again? If you could hire someone else to spend countless hours in your inbox instead of you? This isn’t pure fantasy. For the last 12 months, I’ve experimented with removing myself from the inbox entirely by training other people to behave like me. Not to imitate me, but to think like me. Here’s the upshot: I get more than 1,000 e-mails a day from various accounts.®2 Rather than spending 6-8 hours per day checking e-mail, which I used to do, I can skip reading e-mail altogether for days or even weeks at a time ... all within 4-10 minutes a night. Let me explain the basics, followed by tips and exact templates for outsourcing your own inbox. 1. I have multiple e-mail addresses for specific types of e-mail (blog readers vs. media vs. friends/family, etc.). tim@ ... is the default I give to new acquaintances, which goes to my assistant. 2. 99% of e-mail falls into predetermined categories of inquiries with set questions or responses (my “rules” document is at the bottom of this post—feel free to steal, adapt, and use). My assistant(s) checks and clears the inbox at 11 A.M. and 3 P.M. pst. 3. For the 1% of e-mail that might require my input for next actions, I have a once-daily phone call of 4—10 minutes at 4 P.M. pst with my assistant. 4. If ’'m busy or traveling abroad, my assistant leaves the action items in numerical order on my voicemail, which I can respond to in a bullet-point e-mail. These days, I actually prefer the voice-mail option and find that it forces my assistant to be more prepared and more concise. Each night (or early the next morning), [Il listen to my assistant’s voicemail via Skype and simultaneously write out the next actions (1. Bob: Tell him that ... 2. Jose in Peru: Ask him for ... 3. Speaking in NC: Confirm ..., etc.) in a Skype chat or quick e-mail. How long does the new system take? 4—10 minutes instead of 6-8 hours of filtering and repetitive responses. If you only have one e-mail account, I recommend using a desktop program like Outlook or Mail instead of a web-based program like Gmail for a simple reason: If you see new items in your inbox, you'll check them. Like they say in AA: If you don’t want to slip, don’t go where it’s slippery. This is why I have a private personal account that I use for sending e-mail to my assistant and communicating with friends. It’s almost always empty. E-mail is the last thing people let go of. Fortune 500 CEOs, best-selling authors, celebrities —I know dozens of top performers who delegate everything but e-mail, which they latch onto as something only they can do. “No one can check my e-mail for me” is the unquestioned assumption, or “I answer every e-mail I receive” is the unquestioned bragging right that keeps them in front of a computer for 8-12 hours at a stretch. It’s not fun, and it keeps them from higher-impact or more rewarding activities. Get over yourself. I had to. Checking e-mail isn’t some amazing skill that you alone possess. In fact, checking e-mail is like everything else: a process. How you evaluate and handle (delete vs. archive vs. forward vs. respond) e-mail is just a series of questions you ask yourself, whether consciously or subconsciously. I have a document called “Tim Ferriss Processing Rules,” to which my assistants add rules when I send them a note via e-mail with “ADD TO RULES” in the subject. Over the course of a week or two with a virtual assistant (VA), you will end up with an externalized set of rules that reflect how your brain processes e-mail. It often shows you how haphazard your processing is. I’ve included my “rules” here to save you some time. A few tips: HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_014006