If you are a high-performing woman entrepreneur, one of the most important strategies you need to master is how to deal with your EMAIL.
Now, I outsource my email management to one of my team members, but delegating email to someone else is simply NOT possible for everyone.
If that’s YOU, the best strategy you can use is this:
Master the four D’s of getting out of email jail.
In this episode of Power Play, I lay out exactly what the four D’s are AND how to use each of them effectively so you can focus on the things that truly drive your business forward.
How do YOU manage your email?
Episode Transcript
A couple of years ago, a really good friend of mine had the opportunity to have dinner with Arianna Huffington. She was meeting with a group of people, I believe from the non-profit sector, and just a very casual dinner where they were talking about a bunch of different stuff.
So, I am obsessed with high performing women leaders, and I say to my buddy, what was the biggest thing you took away from this meeting? And he said: ‘one of the things that she emphasized was that, a high performing leader executive entrepreneur needs to have a really effective system for dealing with email.’.
And it totally got me, because I don’t know about you, but my email box inbox has had like 500 messages in it for years and years and years and so this whole myth of zero inbox has been really challenging for me personally.
So I’ve been on the hunt for great tools and strategies to deal with email. And on the Fierce Feminine Leadership podcast, I interviewed a fabulous executive named Kathryn Ferrero and she talked about the Four D’s of getting out of email jail.
So here are the Four D’s. Delete, delegate, deal with or delay. So the idea is that a couple of times a day, you go through the email and every single message gets one of these D’s assigned to it. Either you’re going to:.
– Delete it.
– Or you’re going to delegate it, give it to somebody else who can deal with it on your behalf.
– You are going to deal with it, It’s something that you’re gonna focus on right away and get get it handled.
-Or you’re going to delay, because it’s something that’s gonna take more than sort of two minutes to deal. At that point you delay, but the thing is you’ve got to clear out that delay folder on a daily basis.
So I’ve shared this tool a lot at different workshops and places that I’ve had the opportunity to speak and people really like it.
Now, tip is that I was actually using the Four D’d method for quite a while, but I got to the point where email was creating a lot of challenges for me and it was holding me back from focusing on the things that I really need to focus on. So I actually outsourced email altogether, so don’t actually check email anymore at all. I’ve got a team member who handles that for me and responds for me and that’s been super helpful.
But just something for you to think about if you’re having trouble getting on top of email, try the Four D’s. If you’re in a situation where you have a team member who can support you with that, especially if you’re in any kind of executive or leadership function and you need to be doing that sort of deep thinking, strategic work, you’ve got big things that you need to be focusing on, and the sort of crush of email is just distracting, you may want to consider outsourcing email altogether.