3 Ways to Start Outsourcing Your Email

Nick Johnson, Subject2.com

I’m currently experiencing an increased amount of free time throughout my day. I recently posted Outsourcing My Life where you can see some of the reasoning behind why.

My most active email is with Yahoo and I haven’t really complained about it. It’s a free service and regardless if people think a business email loses its status symbol by using a free service like Yahoo or Gmail, I continued to use regardless.The problem with Yahoo is the amount of incredibility ridiculous level of spam I receive with Yahoo. Not from Yahoo itself, but because the lack of a working spam filter by Yahoo. How many of us receive those funds wired from Africa requests? All too many if you ask me.

What really has been getting on my nerves lately is that I spend so much time ‘conversating’ via email. What would be a quick 2 minute phone call can easily be wasted by 20 or 30 minutes via email. It has provided me an opportunity to create blog content though. Questions that could be grouped into F.A.Q’s and ’stock answers’ are actually somewhat useful and there will be some of that going on here in the future as well.

So I’ve decided to (thanks to Tim Ferriss and his book: 4HWW) to outsource a majority of my email.

Three ways I’ve started my email outsourcing have been:

• Create an auto-responder
• Dust off the ‘ol Gmail account
• Stop having my email in a full time window

I’ll go more into detail later on using those 3 things as separate topics at which time I will link to those posts separately.

I’ve really been at this in the last week or so and I can’t tell you the amount of email activity that has already been cut down! I’m certainly not saying email isn’t important but if you seriously think about it, you’re wasting a lot of your day that could very much be used more productively opening and responding to every little email.

I’m not ‘disconnecting’ from the relationships I have that are primarily communicated via email, I’m simply reducing the amount of ‘conversating’ with those relationships. My responses are less conversational and more concise and short. Tim Ferriss says you need to train those around you and that’s exactly what I’m doing. For those that do email, they’ll subconsciously change their habits when emailing me knowing that they need to quick and to the point.

As I continue to get in the habit of reducing my email interactivity, this will help when I finally get a Virtual Assistant as I will know exactly how and what they need to and are required to do. Without knowing this, you would simply tell your VA to answer your emails or put them all in folders etc…. You’re not really doing yourself any good. I’ll spend the next 2-3 weeks perfecting exactly how I want my emails to be handled, how I want them responded to, forwarded etc….. As Tim Ferriss does, my goal is to have my emails sent to me on an email that I’ve already set up specifically for my future VA and have them sent once a day as a generalized recap of sorts.

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