Should you spend time on your emails?

Oh, I’m a little late, but late is better than never. Happy New Year everybody!

The year 2008 is an auspicious one, and there will be lots of great business opportunities coming by - so I wish every reader a wonderful new year!

The new year period is the period where people start to set resolutions - and its good to do so, its good to have a forward vision and to be optimistic!

Over the past 2 months, I’ve been busy working on a new project (shhh… I’ll talk about it when I’m more ready ) and because of that, I’ve been really slacking on updates to this blog and especially to the comments that are coming in and the emails that I have been receiving.

If you are someone who has emailed me and not yet heard from me, I apologise for that - and please do drop me another mail, I promise to reply! That said, I realise that there are two schools of thought with regard to checking of emails. The “Time Management” person will say “Check your email once every day, at max. Emails are super time wasters!” and I realise sometimes that is true. In fact Andrew is just writing a series on Email Checkup and in the first part of the series he was talking about emails you should delete now - it is a good practise to just dump all the time wasting emails.

But what is time wasting and what is not? Would you consider a request for help “time wasting?” It might take you 30 minutes to reply the email but it doesn’t add up to your busines revenue… but again, what if the request will lead to a business deal?

I was meeting up with a friend today and he was telling me that I need to be more responsive in my email replies. I was too slow in replying emails these days, and I tend to put off replying until the last minute, putting my own project development as priority. He (a sales trainer) said that emails MUST be replied, phone calls must be called back, because you don’t know who is the person who is going to give you your million dollar deal!

So… which school of thought are you on?

Tags: Andrew Flusche, email checkup, new year resolutions