When
marketing a book you need to do these two things: be aware that you should not spam or waste
the time of others. But you also want to
be more effective with your time and that means being better at dealing with your
own in-box.
Jocelyn
K. Cole, put together an excellent primer on this, Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid
Distractions, and Get Real Work Done.
“Email
is broken,” she writes. “Or, more precisely, email has broken us. On a regular
basis, it inspires hatred, guilt, anxiety, anger, and despair. The very last thing we think about when we
think about email is its utility. And
yet we know it’s a useful, necessary part of our everyday lives.”
We
all know that email can be, paradoxically:
·
A
time suck and a useful means of communication
·
A
form of addiction and also a necessity
·
Filled
with loving, useful, informative messages -- as well as ones of hate, uselessness, and ignorance.
We
get overwhelmed by the stream of emails flowing our way but in our quest to get
our in box down to a manageable number we end up engaging in exchanges that
force us to get back even more emails.
How do we control this?
Here
are ways to reduce the madness:
·
Don’t
check your email as often as you have been.
·
Respond
to emails with short emails - anything long is best done by phone or in person.
·
Prioritize
your daily goals and then work in time for email, but don’t let your inbox
dictate the entire day.
·
Let
others know that you can’t immediately respond to emails – take the pressure
off of yourself to respond quickly.
·
Divide
up your emails into categories, from “opportunities” to “fires” to “delete” to
“if there’s time.”
·
See
if you can get others to respond for you or instead of you.
·
See
if an auto-response will suffice.
·
Dispatch
with easy emails to get your in box totals down.
·
Unsubscribe
from things you never signed up for or realize you don’t need to receive.
·
Use
good subject lines to clarify what the em is about.
·
Never
send em when tired, angry, stressed, depressed, hungry or under a deadline.
·
Don’t
make strong accusations or engage in disputes via emails, unless you’re a
disenfranchised consumer.
·
Don’t
curse, threaten or escalate matters in an email.
·
Get
unattached from annoying email chains.
·
Curb
your desire to send a rude email.
To
help with workflow, try to file emails in various folders, so that you don’t
hold onto them in your in-box but you don’t misplace them in case they need to
reference down the road.
“Let’s
face it, email is killing our productivity,” proclaims the book’s back cover
“The average person checks their email 11 times per hour, processes 122
messages a day and spends 28% of their total workout managing their in
box. What was once a powerful and
essential tool for doing our daily work has become a near-consistent source of
frustration, anxiety, and distraction from our work.”
Maybe
what’s really needed is a better approach to time management – not just with
email but every aspect of the business day or one’s life. Check out Kenneth
Zeigler’s Organizing for Success:
Prioritize and Get The Right Things Done, Second Edition.
He
identifies the 12 areas we need to get a handle on:
·
Take
control of your day
·
Project
management
·
Organizing
·
Managing priorities
·
Finding
more time
·
Controlling
your desk
·
Handling
interruptions
·
Managing,
controlling, and writing emails
·
Managing
the phone and using voice mail
·
Delegating
·
Planning
meetings
·
Managing
procrastination
So
what does Zeigler suggest you do to be efficiently organized?
·
Accept
the reality you won’t get everything done today
·
Have
a portable master to-do list. Skip lines on your to-do list so you can fill in
related details as needed
·
Focus
on one thing at a time – for completion
·
Improve
your communication skills to reduce conflicts, ambiguity, confusion, or
wrongful assumptions
·
Train
others to be effective and handle more, thus reducing what you need to do.
·
Batch
like tasks or activities
·
Slow
down, as speed causes mistakes
·
Defer
immediate requests where possible as they may end up working themselves out
before you need to get involved
·
Work
around your natural energy – level cycles
·
Tell
others our time is limited
·
Give
others deadlines to act
·
Visualize
the end result to something and then tackle the smaller steps to lead to such a
result
·
Delegate
often – but choose the right person
·
Reward
yourself and others for completing a task ahead of schedule
·
Keep
meetings short and focused
·
Avoid
phone tag by offering days/times to connect
·
Don’t
use post-its, only a master to-do list
·
Give
yourself a pep talk
·
Even
if a project isn’t due for a bit, get working on it now so you won’t have to do
it all at the end
Good
Luck!
DON”T MISS THESE!!!
2017 Book Publicity & Marketing Toolkit
For Writers Of All Genres
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Would Madison Avenue Hawk Your Book?
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Blogs: What Should They Say?
The
Network of Book Marketing For Authors
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Of These 6 Reasons Inspires You To Write Books?
How
To Craft Press Releases That Net Your Book Media Exposure
The
right book marketing strategy for you
Overcoming Book Marketer's Block in 10 Easy
Steps
http://bookmarketingbuzzblog.blogspot.com/2017/01/overcoming-book-marketers-block-in-10.html
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