Spend Less Time Email More Time Achieving

Do you find yourself prisoner to your email app? Most people do. It’s intrusive, demanding, and the perfect excuse for procrastination. It’s also mostly garbage, or mine is at least. But there are alternatives for anybody determined to break it’s hold.

In this post Matthew May describes new software which helps us get things done. Yes, another one. It really is a busy market. (We aren’t too impressed with any of them, for the simple reason they never keep information in context, but that’s another story.) He illustrates the benefits any business application should deliver to users. That’s what caught my attention, because it’s exactly what Front Office Box does. He could as easily have written this about our software – but would need to add the way we keep everything in multiple dimensions.

The benefits he describes are:
1. It keeps actions separate from email.
2. It helps me track what I really need to know.
3. The design keeps me tied to the app.
4. It builds accountability.
5. It creates transparency.
6. It works the way I do in real life.
7. It propels the “do” and subordinates the backstory.

The first item really spoke to me – keeping actions separate from email – because using our email application to keep notes ties us to the infernal inbox, and stops us getting on with the day job.

We solved this problem

a long time ago with an idea coming from the best of sources – our Users.

Luckily Paul Barnard knows a lot about insurance, and nothing about software and systems. He was the first to use Front Office Box as his business management system, and came up with lots of ideas. The best of these was how to handle email.

Paul wanted to start the day with some time processing his inbox. Anything related to clients, plans or actions he wanted to forward to his Front Office Box. When he’d finished with the inbox he’d goto his Dashboard and process the incoming – adding new opportunities, updating client records, changing plans.

He designed his own workflow

letting him get everything done right at the start of the day so he could spend the rest of the day on the important stuff, knowing everything was in hand and in the right place.
In Paul’s case the rest of the day usually means the golf course.

I recommend this approach myself

I don’t get to spend many days on the golf course, but am managing a number of nascent businesses. Constant interrupt by email really spoils my productivity and quality. One of my projects requires me to collect hundreds of articles in my Google Reader, so I have the interrupt problem coming from several sources.

Now I forward every interrupt message to my own Front Office Box – emails, voicemails, Tweets, blog posts, news articles. This probably takes an hour first thing in the morning. After that I can get on with doing something about those important messages, without interruption.

If you see him, please don’t tell Paul about this article. I’ll never hear the last of it.