Today, I want to talk to you about focus and your use of your time. Everyone in this business seems to go through this same things: overwhelm. I did a whole series on this that you can find here:

#73 Overcoming Amazon Overwhelm - Part 1

#74 Overcoming Amazon Overwhelm - Part 2 – Energy

#75 Prioritising Tasks - Overcoming Amazon Overwhelm Part - 3

However, today I want to talk about the biggest time-suck in your life, which is email. Email is one of those things that seems like a productive use of your time, and if you worked in a corporate environment, or still do, you can relate to this. Email is one of the most common things in everybody’s life. For many people it’s the first thing you do in the morning.  You go through your email with your coffee when you wake up. If this is you, STOP.

Take Control of Your Agenda

If the first thing that you do in the morning is work on emails, whose agenda are you following for your time? Not yours. I’d say it’s being set by the people that have emailed you which could be anyone.

If you think that your boss or your clients won’t be understanding, then maybe, you can prioritise them and only them by filtering your inbox. Though, I’m not entirely convinced that you have to respond to them by 9 am. However, if you do, them schedule a time for that rather than react to the email coming in.

Chances are though, you could get away with answering emails twice a day. 11 am is usually early enough for most emails; then again at 4 pm. If this makes you uncomfortable and you’re worried you may miss something important, put it in your signature. Let them know that you don’t read emails often and offer an alternative way of contacting you if it can’t wait. Let them know that they can contact you on your mobile. Now, don’t put your mobile number in the email. The people that will need to contact you via mobile with have it. You don’t want to get a bunch of random calls throughout your day. That would defeat the purpose.

The purpose is to take control of your time. By limiting your time spent on email and limiting who has access to your attention, you are able to plan your day as you see fit rather than being bombarded by random conversations that make it impossible to focus.

Limit Social Media

Another thing that people do is check Facebook obsessively. Personally, despite have a lot of Facebook friends because of the podcast, I don’t get on Facebook much. Giving credit to Tim Ferriss of the 4-Hour-Workweek, we don’t increase productivity by adding things but rather by removing them.

What this Means for Your Amazon Business

The number one productivity killer is email. If you are letting it take over your life, stop right there. If you are looking for a specific email, say from a supplier, that will help move your business forward, then order your inbox by the “From” field rather than “Date”. That way you can look for a specific person rather than being saturated with all the emails you have received recently.

Another time-trap with email is when you are trying to compose a message to go out. Obviously, you have to go into an email system to do this and then get sucked into your inbox. What I have begun to do is draft the email outside of the system. I will go into notes or notepad and compose it there.

If you are going to be sending similar emails to different people then make sure you are using templates. This does two things. It creates a standardized process so your are simply doing copy, paste, send, rather than typing it up every time. It also keeps you off the email system.