Is Your Email Running Your Life?

We all know how it goes. In spite of your great spam software, you open your email to find 30 new messages (even though you had gone through everything before you went to bed a mere eight hours ago). Of those 30 messages, 20 want you to buy something; the other 10 are related to your social networking site or newsletters of some type.

You start opening some of them because, well, they look interesting. You click on a link in the email because, well, that looks interesting too. Pretty soon you have looked at five websites, dreamed about ordering something you saw, and 45 minutes has gone by.

You wonder how you ended up with so much email. When did you sign up for all these emails?

Constantly getting emails can also interfere with your work day. If you stay signed in to your account, you get a pop-up telling you that you have new mail. Part of you may not want to look at it right now, but you really want to see what it is. (Sometimes the pop-up tells you what the subject is, but not always.) Besides, maybe you are waiting for an email that might actually be important—you know, something to do with your actual business.

How do you control the emails rather than have them control you? First, resist the temptation to look at every single email that arrives the minute it arrives. Schedule the times in your day when you will answer email and stick to it. Consider turning off the automatic notification to avoid the constant distraction of knowing that you have new mail.

Be careful any time you order something or request information. Often, buried in the bottom of the request, there is a box saying that you want to receive so and so’s newsletter as well as several other offers to receive information by email. Many times that box or boxes is automatically checked.

Feel free to go through and uncheck those boxes (unless, of course, you are really interested in receiving the information).

Unsubscribe! They have to tell you how to do it somewhere in the email. Take the time and actually unsubscribe. It is easy to just hit the delete button, but unsubscribing will solve the problem for good.

The more you are out on the web, the more likely that you will end up on mailing lists or receive information that you never requested. Multilevel marketers are, by design, on the web a lot, so are likely targets. Only provide an email address if you are requested to do so (and even then think about going back into the site and deleting your information).

With a little thought and some perseverance, you can master your inbox.

It is hard to check five email inboxes, three voice mail systems, or five blogs that you are tracking. David Rose