Punch Your Inbox in the Face

Remember when you controlled your inbox? You would receive an email from a newsletter that you actually remember signing up for. Or you might receive that occasional email from the handful of friends who used Hotmail.

The email inbox was a calm and quiet receptacle of welcomed messages, perhaps interrupted only by a beautiful and exhilarating sound. Email was manageable and fun.

Inboxes are no longer manageable nor fun. They are out of control. It's time to punch your inbox in the face. 

A few years ago, Basecamp's Jason Fried asked the perfect question from  the stage at Big Omaha, a conference about entrepreneurship in Omaha, Neb.: "When did our inboxes become a dumping ground for other people's to-do lists?" I recall him saying. He was right. Whether someone works at a big corporation, a small startup or even on family affairs, inboxes have become the place for passing the buck. 

As email became ubiquitous, it turned into a primary form of communication for many, replacing the telephone and face-to-face discussion. What's the major difference between email and the phone or face-to-face communication? It's emotionless.

It's much easier to ask for a favor, reassign a task or place blame via email because there's no emotion. It's not possible to hear someone's voice or look into that person's eyes. 

Let's not take the easy way out.

How do people stop it? Email can be a tsunami, an unstoppable force that people can only hope to survive. And when they do, they strive to reach the hard-to-attain inbox zero.

Related: Achieve a Leaner Inbox With These 3 Fit Tips

1. Setting boundaries

A friend of mine has this message as his auto-responder to all emails in his inbox.

Email Tips:
I check my email every few hours ... be patient.
The shorter your message the quicker I'll respond.

The first time I received this response I felt a bit disrespected and that he was being rude. How does he not have time for my email? Then I realized. This is brilliant. 

Set email boundaries. Do you check email first thing in the morning, at lunch and at the end of the day? Do you work on emails only from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.? Or do you only check email on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Only you know what would work best for you but boundaries are crucial. 

2. Don't exceed expectations.

I often tell members of my team at my company, Lemonly, to not set false email expectations. Certainly, we want to deliver great service and practice quick communication with clients, but when employees respond to emails at 10:30 p.m. or Sunday afternoons, they just made it acceptable for clients to email at those times. Plus, customers might then expect a response on Sundays going forward.

Some companies have gone as far as banning email before 6 a.m. and after 6 p.m. This eases the email burden on employees and eliminates the pressure of trying to catch up or get ahead. A German car company, Daimler, has installed software that deletes emails for people while they're on vacation or out of the office. Daimler is protecting its team from the email tsunami. Everyone should do the same.

Related: It's All About Nuance. How to Convey and Discern Email Tone.

3. Write better emails.

Maybe you're writing poor emails. Are they too long? Too short? What's the perfect length for an email?

Guy Kawasaki said, "Less than five sentences is often abrupt and rude, more than five sentences wastes time." The author and founder of All-Top said, "Proper email is a balance between politeness and succinctness."

Rethink email writing. Be polite, yet succinct.

4. Let it go.

Stop treating email like the most important thing in life. Don't let your inbox dictate your day. Those little red notification numbers do not dictate your success or failure.

Punch that inbox in the face and get on with your life. 

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How Much Value Do Your Employees Bring to the Bottom Line?

When you stop to think about it, the only people standing between you and the acquisition of lifetime customers are your employees.

And yet, getting your employees on board with your mission isn't easy. This joke pretty much sums it up: One business owner asked another, “How many employees do you have working for you?" The other replied, “About half.”

All kidding aside, let’s take this thought process one step further and let me ask you this question: How much is each one of your employees worth to your company? 

info.sprocketcmms.com

For the sake of this article, let’s use a yardstick of just one year. Hypothetically, let’s assume if the amount of money one customer would spend with your company over a 12 month period is $500. If each one of your employees comes into contact with 10 customers per week, then when we multiply that number of new customers over 50 weeks, this comes to 500 customers per year, per employee. The potential retention power over the short term of one year has a financial impact of $250,000 of gross revenues per employee.

So what can you do to make sure that the employees you have on your team live up to your expectations? Plenty!

First, you must begin looking at each employee as a profit center, if you're not already. This means that, with the right amount of psychological and financial investment in each of your team members, they can begin to develop their full potential and contribute to the company’s bottom line.

By psychological investment, I am referring to how you and your management treat them. It has been said that employees don’t leave a job, they leave a boss or manager. In other words, if they don’t get the support and praise they deserve, their psychological bank account is empty. Once it becomes empty, they usually begin looking elsewhere for employment.

Financial investment refers to the amount of money you invest in their education and training. In today’s economy you can’t afford to retain employees who have the wrong attitude, or are lacking the necessary people or technical skill sets. These people are non-productive and literally steal money away from your bottom line.

Some business owners are reticent in investing in training for their employees, saying they cannot afford to invest in them or are worried that training employees will make them better equipped to leave for some other company. To answer these concerns, I remember how one business owner told me that he couldn’t afford not to train employees. As he explained it to me, “If they don’t produce, I don’t make money.”

In other words, we need to hire the best people we can find, and prepare them through the right kind of focused training and development programs. When you invest in developing your employee capital, you increase the percentage of the number of successful one-on-one encounters with your customers, whether it is in person, on the Internet, or over the telephone. (Despite the abundance of technological options that your customers have to interface with your business, for many customers, face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact is still the most important.)

So, how much value do your employees bring to your company?  Let the numbers do the talking and invest in your team accordingly.

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80/20 Life - Get More from Less

We’ve all surely heard of the 80/20 Principle, or Pareto’s Law as it’s more formally known. It goes something like this:

80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.

It’s often thrown around in business as nothing more than a buzzword. Few actually do a full 80/20 analysis of their business and almost no one I’ve come across has applied the same to their life as a whole. Other than two people that is: Richard Kock and Tim Ferriss–and the people who have since followed in their footsteps (me included). The 80/20 Principle is the source material for what Tim wrote in The 4-Hour Work Week. It took me reading it a couple times to grasp the simplicity and life-altering implications of the principle. The time saved and gained will blow your mind.

mattbodnar.com

The amazing thing is that the studies in this book show the principle working in just about every possible scenario. Of course it’s not always 80/20. Sometimes 90/10 or 95/5 or even 70/30. But the point is it works–without fail.

Richard’s purpose was to explain this ancient principle in a way that would inspire action and application to every part of life. When applied to work, productivity will go through the roof, but when applied to your life outside of work, happiness and fulfillment do just the same. All it takes is a shift in thinking. Try the following for a few weeks and the time in your life will never be the same.

5 ways to apply the 80/20 Principle to enhance your life:

1. Do the 20% of your work that leads to 80% of your results: Track all the time you spend on projects each hour of each day for a week. How many of these things were necessary? How many got you closer to your goals? How many were a waste of time? How many could someone else have done? Pick the 20% of your tasks that yield 80% of the results and outsource or simply discontinue the rest. Wondering what to do with your remaining time? Enjoy life. I outsourced a significant portion of my work to two very reliable virtual assistants in India starting in 2006. Ravi and Vikash now do that 70 or 80% for me. At $3-5/hour it is very hard to beat. Check out eLance.com if you’re looking to out source. Search “Virtual Assistant”. Once you start outsourcing, you’ll never go back.

2. Locate the 20% of your customers who drive 80% of your profits: Find your top 20% customers (by profit, not revenue) and fire the rest. Yes, fire them. The goal is not to work your life away. It is to make a good living to enjoy your life. If you must work more, then list out the characteristics of your 20% customers and go out and find more of them. You will not believe how liberating it can be to fire a customer who’s been a real pain in the ass.

3. Prioritize the 20% of your friends who provide 80% of your support and enjoyment: If you apply 80/20 to your relationships you will surely find that a few people in your life provide the majority of your support, excitement, laughter and feelings of connection. On the other side, there is likely another 20% group of people who account for most your sleepless nights, tears, anger and frustration. If you don’t want to feel this way, stop spending time around your bottom 20. Fire them and work on duplicating your top 20. This may sound a little callous, but it’s not. It’s practical. The quality of our life comes down to the quality of the people and experiences that fill it.

4. Fill your life with the 20% of your experiences that provide 80% of your happiness: As humans, our two biggest priorities are to move towards pleasure and away from pain. As mentioned above, find the few people, things, places and experiences that provide 80% of your happiness, fulfillment, pleasure and excitement. Also find the things that cause you to feel the majority of your negative emotions. Focus your time on the top 20% and avoid the bottom 20% like the plague.

5. Do the 20% of your workouts that lead to 80% of your physical gains: The majority of fitness results come from a small portion of most workouts. 80% of the muscle is built in the last 20% of the reps. Crossfit is a great example. The workouts are 7-14 minutes long on average but they provide more physical benefit than most hour-long workouts. Spending more time on something is not always a good thing. If you believe your workouts must take an hour then you’ll likely miss a lot more of them. What if they only took 7 minutes, but that seven minutes really tested your limits? You’re likely to show up a lot more often.

I know this sounds simple. But few people stop to actually do it.  It is truly possible to spend the majority of your time doing the things that you love. The only way to get there is taking Pareto’s 80/20 principle seriously. It will make all the difference.

Do not let more than 3 months go by without performing a full 80/20 breakdown of all areas of your life (especially your personal life). It will only take a couple hours and those hours will likely save days before you know it… 80/20 in action yet again.

Somewhere along the path of life, most of us were taught to associate fulfillment and worth with the number of hours spent–thinking the more the better. This has lead many of us to working aimlessly just to say we filled the day. This IS NOT the goal. The goal is be fulfilled, happy, efficient, effective and more than anything else, to enjoy life. Happiness is a daily right. It is not something we need to work our ass off for years to finally achieve. That is what Pareto stumbled on all these years ago. I encourage you to do the same.

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3 Habits Surprisingly Killing Your Productivity

Yesterday about 6:30 p.m. a gaping sense of panic set in. Did I send that article? Wait, did I finish that article? Hey, did I eat today? Why are the lights off? Did everyone leave? How did this happen to me, again?

I was content with my accomplishments that day, never leaving my workstation.

At one point, I responded to twenty emails, while answering the phone. In addition, I scheduled five meetings, created a beautiful report with splashy graphics and squeezed in assisting a teammate.

Turns out my leg muscles were cramped, two of those meetings were scheduled at the same time and a bewildered client called to inquire why I emailed her regarding my cat, Mr. Whiskers. By the way, I missed the crucial deadline, never having forwarded the article.

Sound familiar? I’m positive I’m not the only one that thinks I’m helping myself, yet in reality, has developed destructive habits that have directly affected my level of productivity.

Take a look at these three top offenders and recommendations on how to counteract these habits.

For Goodness Sake Don’t Skip The Break

We spend our lives wishing for more time. Convinced the only way to add time to the clock is to skip our breaks. Should we honestly wonder why our brains are feeling fuzzy and we are severely unfocused?
Set a reminder on your calendar, don’t ignore it. When it goes off, stand up, stroll around the room. 

Better yet, wander outside, breathe in fresh air. It’s a fact, brains require oxygen. Don’t be opposed to a quick set of jumping jacks just to ensure the blood begins to flow. Consider taking that lunch or break and consuming one of these superfoods that help support an active, productive, and healthy brain.

Provided you followed the above advice, the fog in your head is now clear, allowing your brain to return to creative problem solving. Built up stress between your shoulder blades has finally let go of it’s tight clutch. 

You’re coherent and ready to pounce on that massive project you have been ignoring.

In addition, a quick meditation break also can lower your stress, giving you back a sense of peace and purpose creating a joyful attitude. Come on, cheerful people are so much nicer to be around. Right?

Meet the Zen Master of Multitasking

For years we have all been proudly adding the title “King of the Multitaskers” to our resumes. Delighted we can type 80 wpm, send off a bunch of emails and call fifteen clients, simultaneously!

Turns out, this could be the most destructive habit that numerous people are still guilty of developing. 

Multitasking typically equals mediocre work, including a high percentage of mistakes. Studies have shown that if you are splitting your focal point between tasks, fragments of focus are pointing toward each of the tasks you are trying to accomplish. However, most of the attention is pointed towards the actual act of switching tasks potentially losing up to 40% of your productivity.

This explained why yesterday I dialed the wrong number five times before connecting with the right customer and why my best client received a lengthy email detailing Mr. Whisker’s infatuation with his new cat toy.

Desperate for a recommendation on how to break this loathsome routine? After wasted hours surfing the net (another habit to break), I stumbled on the Pomodoro Technique® . Surprisingly, this not only helped break me of the dreaded multitasking habit. It also aided with time management, forcing myself into those much needed breaks that were being ignored.

The Pomodoro Technique®, created by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980’s, focuses on utilizing twenty-five minute blocks of time to focus on a single activity, taking a mini break after each block and a larger break after completing four blocks of time. For me the key was prioritizing tasks, placing the most vital on the list into the early morning portion of the day. I began feeling exceptionally focused, completing two extra assignments per day.

Um…No?

A co-worker once gifted me a magnet, thinking it captured my attitude perfectly. It reads: “No, No I’m sorry I can’t, No….OK, I will be there Friday at 8:00.” So many of us can be categorized as people pleasers, never wanting to be heard saying no. We also like being viewed as willing to help and first to volunteer. 

Besides, some of us are under the impression that by being seen as the Yes Man for our supervisors, we are ensuring ourselves an opportunity to get ahead.

However, with today’s packed schedules, that behavior results in becoming bogged down. Trying to juggle tasks and complete assignments leads to sacrificing quality for quantity. We run the risk of pushing our calendars to maximum capacity as pleas for our assistance or requests for meetings flood into our inbox. 

In addition, with today’s economy, we are fearful that we will be out of a job if we use the dreaded “no” word.

Why are we afraid to say no? It could easily be traced to the fact that when most of us are learning how to talk one of our first words is “NO”. Soon after, our toddler selves learn this powerful word, our parents quickly reverse the knowledge insisting we don’t say it. We learn it can be rude, borderline impolite.

Consider this, saying yes can have negative consequences. Potentially sacrificing our own deadlines, turning assignments in late and completing less than superior work. Thusly, appearing incapable.

By trial and error I finally learned “no” is an acceptable response. I always try to include a reason and a possible alternative suggestion. It’s justifiable to state: I am up against a deadline. I have time available to assist you tomorrow.

If your boss asks you to take on an additional project, state your concerns. Share that you value the attention to detailed, quality work and you would feel it’s best to wrap up the current task you are working on before diving into this new assignment. Be prepared that his answer might also be no. If so, ask him to sit down with you and re-evaluate the order of priorities.

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Rohn: A Good Life Contains These 6 Essentials

The values that make up the foundation of a life well lived—and, no surprise, money isn’t one of them Jim Rohn

The ultimate expression of life is not a paycheck. The ultimate expression of life is not a Mercedes. The ultimate expression of life is not a million dollars or a bank account or a home. The ultimate expression of life is living a good life.

Here's what we must ask constantly, "What, for me, would be a good life?" And you have to keep going over and over the list—a list including areas such as spirituality, economics, health, relationships and recreation.

So, what would constitute a good life? Jim Rohn has a short list:

1. Productivity. You won't be happy if you don't produce. The game of life is not rest. Yes, we must rest, but only long enough to gather strength to get back to productivity.

What's the reason for the seasons and the seeds, the soil and the sunshine, the rain and the miracle of life? It's to see what you can do with it—to try your hand to see what you can do.

2. Good friends. Friendship is probably the greatest support system in the world, so don't deny yourself the time to develop it. Nothing can match it. It's extraordinary in its benefit.

Friends are those wonderful people who know all about you and still like you. I lost one of my dearest friends when he was 53—heart attack. As one of my very special friends, I used to say that if I was stuck in a foreign jail somewhere accused unduly, and, if they would allow me one phone call, I would call David. Why? He would come and get me. That's a real friend—somebody who would come and get you.

And we've all got casual friends, friends who, if you called them, they would say, "Hey, if you get back, call me and we'll have a party."

You’ve got to have both real friends and casual friends.

3. Your culture. Language, music, ceremonies, traditions, dress. All of that is so vitally important that you must keep it alive. The uniqueness of all of us, when blended together, brings vitality, energy, power, influence, uniqueness of all of us, when blended together, brings vitality, energy, power, influence, uniqueness and rightness to the world.

4. Spirituality. It helps to form the foundation of the family that builds the nation. And make sure you study, practice and teach—don't be careless about the spiritual part of your nature because it's what makes us who we are, different from dogs, cats, birds and mice.

5. Don't miss anything. My parents taught me not to miss anything, not the game, the performance, the movie, the dance. Just before my father died at 93, if you were to call him at 10:30 or 11 at night, he wouldn't be home. He was at the rodeo, he was watching the kids play softball, he was listening to the concert, he was at church—he was somewhere every night.

Go to everything you possibly can. Buy a ticket to everything you possibly can. Go see everything and experience all you possibly can.

Live a vital life. If you live well, you will earn well. If you live well, it will show in your face; it will show in the texture of your voice. There will be something unique and magical about you if you live well. It will infuse not only your personal life but also your business life. And it will give you a vitality nothing else can give.

6. Your family and the inner circle. Invest in them, and they'll invest in you. Inspire them, and they'll inspire you. Take care of the details with your inner circle.

When my father was still alive, I used to call him when I traveled. He'd have breakfast most every morning with the farmers at a little place called The Decoy Inn out in the country where we lived in Southwest Idaho.

When I was in Israel, I'd have to get up in the middle of the night, but I'd call Papa. I'd say, "Papa, I'm in Israel." He'd say, "Israel! Son, how are things in Israel?" He'd talk real loud so everybody could hear. I'd say, "Papa, last night they gave me a reception on the rooftop underneath the stars overlooking the Mediterranean." He'd say, "Son, a reception on the rooftop underneath the stars overlooking the Mediterranean?" Now everybody knew the story. And giving my father that special day only took five or 10 minutes.

If a father walks out of the house and he can still feel his daughter's kiss on his face all day, he's a powerful man. If a husband walks out of the house and he can still feel the imprint of his wife's arms around his body, he's invincible all day. It's the special stuff with your inner circle that makes you strong and powerful and influential. So don't miss that opportunity.

The prophet said, "There are many virtues and values, but here's the greatest: one person caring for another." There is no greater value than love.

So make sure in your busy day to remember the true purpose and the reasons you do what you do. May you truly live the kind of life that will bring the fruit and rewards that you desire.

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