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E-mail help or a curse?

E-mail has become a way of life for most entrepreneurs. It allows you to easily communicate with your entire staff and your customers. This type of communication is critical to your business as it allows you to quickly exchange information. Many people are no longer concerned with street addresses and are much more interested in e-mail addresses. This is especially true, the younger the person.

As with much of technology, the promise of time saving has not materialized. E-mail is no exception as it so easy for any person to write in this medium. In fact, e-mail can be a terrible time trap for the entrepreneur.

Many entrepreneurs with e-mail spend two or three hours a day or even more responding to these electronic messages. Even more troubling are the entrepreneurs who constantly each day monitor their e-mail and respond to this accordingly. This frequent checking of e-mail destroys the ability of an entrepreneur to focus in on the major challenges of their business. The most critical asset in most small businesses is the time of the owner. To destroy or significantly limit entrepreneur's time by reading and responding to e-mail messages, is a travesty.

Many entrepreneurs think that they must respond quickly to any e-mail they receive as it might be discourteous or showing a lack of respect not to reply quickly. Sure you need to respond promptly but not instantaneously. Most people realize that you are busy and are not expecting an immediate reply. Once this habit of quickly replying begins, then it is difficult to change. However it is changeable if the entrepreneur realizes that this habit is significantly affecting their business.

There are a couple of things you can do to get e-mail back to a more reasonable time allocation. First, try to realize that most customers and associates know that you are very busy and are not expecting an instant reply. How I handle this, is to allocate a half hour a day to answer all of my e-mails. Are my responses long and flowery, no! My average e-mail is about one or two sentences. Now of course, there are going to be times when you have to write more and you need to spend the time to do this. The point, however, is that you can eliminate the time trap of e-mail by limiting the amount of time that you allocate to this process and not constantly checking your email (I know this is going to be hard for a lot of folks).

Another thing that I have seen entrepreneurs do, who are aware of this problem, is to have an assistant go through their e-mail and only forward the critical ones to them. Obviously, you need to have trust built up with your assistant to make this work.

One thing that will speed up your answers is to have some pat answers already saved so that you can cut and paste into a message rather than retyping it again. Also, once voice recognition is really perfected, and it is almost here, at an affordable price, you will be able to quickly respond to your e-mail.

E-mail can be both a virtue and a time trap. Choose to limit your time on this important but time-consuming task.