40: What is your disorganized email costing you?
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Welcome to episode 40 of Permission to be Messy. I'm your host, JoAnn Krall and today's topic is what is your disorganized inbox costing you? Some of it's monetary, but some of it can cost you in other areas, whether it be your time or your mental health.
And if you're listening to this episode, On the day that it's released or tomorrow, there is still time to join me for an experience experiment that I'm doing around email organization, Where you will benefit from my live, coaching strategy. And I will benefit by building an evergreen email organization course that I can offer to people in the future.
Okay. I have seven consequences. that revolve around having a disorganized inbox. The first one's an obvious one, stress and overwhelm. I think this is the thing that people think of the most. when I bring this subject up, they think, oh, I'm so stressed. I have so many and believe me, there's so many people with a lot. If it's causing you stress and overwhelm, it's probably a great area to start getting organized in,it can be foundational to a lot of different things and that will come up as we talk about the next consequences.
Okay. So number two. Is missed opportunities. Now this could be personal. you may miss a party or a family reunion, or maybe you miss out on things, professionally new jobs, or if you're in business, you miss out on clients or, connecting and networking. And that can eventually cost you money. So it's really important to make sure that you have some sort of system that you're not letting those emails get lost.
Now the third one. goes along with productivity, but remember I'm not using that word anymore. It's really a time suck when you have so many emails and you have to sift through to find what you need. That alone can take you a long time. Some things are easily searchable, but other things aren't and sometimes we have to scroll through. So the less you have the easier that will be. So just, having those systems in place and being able to find things easily is going to really give you back a lot of time. We talk about time management all the time, and that is a big piece of it. reducing, search time for things. whether you're talking about email or you're just, looking for your keys in the morning. That is one of the things that we can eliminate to make it easier to just give us back some more time.
The fourth thing is strained relationships. Again, this can both be personally and professionally. Our friends and our family know us well enough. So it's not necessarily going to strain a relationship. They know whether we have our email under control or not. And so they don't necessarily think that we're ignoring them but professionally, this can be a problem.
If people are sending you professional emails, whether it's, within your job or if you have your own business. And you're not replying you're definitely going to look unprofessional, especially if that person has to continually reach out to you in order to make themselves seen in the inbox. And I'm not talking about those people that spam us. there are plenty of emails that I do not respond to because I know that they're just trying to sell me something and I don't have time to respond to them.
And a lot of times those people will send me repeated ones over and over. And my inbox is not a place where I take solicitations. So I do read them to make sure there isn't somebody who's legit, but typically I let those go.
Number five is a big one and it never really occurred to me until recently there are people out there trying to,spam bomb, my, my inbox there, they will sign me up for things. And I don't know if this is automatic or if my email was sold and it's companies just doing that. every once in a while there'll be a rush on a bunch of emails that I did not sign up for. And,I'm not sure what's going on there, but I'm very mindful of making sure. I don't let anything else get lost in there because what I learned was. There are people that will do these email bombings. That's what they call them. They're flooding your email with all these new subscriptions. And then they'll do something in between where maybe they order something on Amazon and you'll miss it because you just have so many emails and you don't see it, or they'll go, something will happen with your bank and you won't see the notification. this is a really important reason to make sure that you're seeing what's coming into your email, because if somebody does something and they've got a hold of your email and they've. They've somehow gotten into one of your accounts. You want to be able to see that. This applies to anything. If you get an email from your bank or you get an email from Netflix that says, Your account's being used somewhere else. You want to make sure, first of all, you want to make sure it's legit because there are plenty of emails out there that, they'll tell you this, something wrong with your account and you either don't even have that account or it's just spam. So you really have to be mindful of that.
But when you have a cleaner inbox, it's a lot easier to not panic and stress out and see an email and think, oh my gosh, there's something wrong with my bank. You can go in calmly, you can look and see who it's actually coming from. You never click on anything in any email. You always want to call reach out to the service on your own to see if what you're being sent is legit. All right. That's really the key. Just make sure that no security issues or anything like that, or being buried amongst your email.
And number six, This would be for legitimate things that happen. So sometimes there is legitimate activity on one of your credit cards, that's fraud, or you will receive a bill and, you'll get it through email and you won't see it, and then you won't pay it, which can result in late fees and credit things. And maybe your insurance is coming up for review or renewal, and maybe you want to look at it and you want to catch it before it actually renews at a higher cost than you may want. This just boils down to all the important emails, getting buried, but these would be legitimate things you want to make sure that those emails that you have a system. So that when your inbox does get out of control, because it happens to all of us, we're not always at inbox zero. But you want to have a system in place that those important emails stand out to you and you don't miss
and then of course, number seven goes right along with this it's, anything legal. I look at bills, insurance and legal as all the same importance. And so you want to make sure that there isn't something, that you're missing there. I just got an email from Pinterest that one of my pins was removed and I thought, oh, all of my pins are things that I pin of my own. So I'm not violating anything, but it was, I had shared, somebody had pinned. somebody had pinned a desk that I thought was really cool. And so I repinned it. So I think they just removed the repin. It wasn't anything I created and it was the person who designed the desk. They must have, somebody must have stole it as their idea. And I shared it. that was really important for me to see that email from Pinterest, nothing was wrong. They weren't telling me, that I had any strikes against me, but if I had. That would be really important to know, because I never want to lose my Pinterest account. And by the way, if you're not following me on Pinterest, you really should. So those seven things. And there's probably so many more that, you know, If something comes up new all the time. when we're talking about email. But there are strategies, to keep your inbox clutter-free and to actually set up organization so that, like I said, when things get a little bit full and you haven't done a clean-out. You still have those things in place that are going to make other things stand out to you. Again, like I mentioned in the beginning, I'm doing this really awesome thing where it's an offer where it's a pay, what you can, and it, the minimum is $11 and I'm totally fine with people paying $11. Of course, if people can pay more and they think that getting their email under control, would be valuable. This is going to be a live experience over the next four weeks, starting on Wednesday. October 25th. And, it will be at 7:00 PM Eastern standard time. You don't have to make all of the live calls. I do want to get as many people as I can on at least one call so that I can gather as many situations,and scenarios and me helping them. that's gonna spark what I need to put into an evergreen program because creating a program about email organization without making it cookie cutter is a challenge. So I decided to do this live experience where I'm actually pulling in as many different situations as I can and creating the course. And then of course, as things come up, as people go through the course and they have a question that, didn't get addressed, I can then add that. So I like to build things as I go along because I want everything to fit my client's needs.
So if you're interested in that the link is going to be in the show notes. As always contact me if you have a topic that you'd like me to talk about. If you like the idea of that live experience and you can't do it, I'm not going to be doing the email one again, but I may do it on another topic. So if you have any area of organization that you think might fit that, reach out to me and let me know. And as always, I'm wishing you much progress, peace, purpose, and the permission to be messy. Thanks for listening.
