An executive assistant can get you out of seemingly eternal email hell.
Are you the type of person with 1,299+ unread emails in your inbox? Do you feel like you’re constantly overwhelmed by your email, and you need to get a handle on all those incoming messages? An executive assistant may be the answer.
As a small business owner, you likely have more important things to worry about than sorting through your inbox. You should be focusing on what matters: driving leads and focusing on your bottom line. Why not let an executive assistant handle the less important day-to-day tasks, such as getting rid of those fussy spam messages?
Wondering how exactly an assistant can get you out of email hell? Here’s how can EA can help you tackle your unruly email inbox.
Delegate.
You may not feel comfortable handing your personal email account over to another person, no matter how much you trust that person. That’s why email delegation is a great option. With this tool, you can choose how much access your assistant has. Over at the Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuel suggests sharing access to your email by using a delegation service such as those offered by Gmail or Outlook. “Delegation allows someone else to access your email using their own password; you can revoke that access at any time. Outlook even allows you to customize your delegation setup to limit which items your assistant can view.” Email delegation allows you valuable peace of mind when giving an assistant control over your inbox.
Establish a reply protocol.
To speed up your email response time, you can draft form responses that your EA can then easily send out. For example, if a new lead comes in, you can have them send a message that says something along the lines of, ‘Thank you for your message! I’m looking forward to speaking with you. To move our conversation forward, would you offer some times this week for a call?’ On that note, you can also have your assistant schedule meetings for you, which often takes 5 or 6 emails just to set up. Figure out a system of standard email responses and etiquette that is straightforward, so there’s never any confusion (or unwanted sent messages).
Flag and tag emails, giving you a sense of what’s important—and what’s not.
To organize your inbox, your assistant can sort your email, flagging and tagging emails by level of importance and/or category. Ask them to sort mail using custom tags, such as “Personal,” “Bills,” “Leads,” etc. or “Urgent” or “Non-urgent.” You can also set up a tag just for your assistant (“Dan” or “Erica”), so they know which emails require their attention.
Delete the garbage!
Most of the time, we get so much junk mail, we have a hard time seeing the critical messages. Your EA can go through your inbox deleting the e-newsletters and spam messages. With an EA, say goodbye to inbox clutter.
Want to learn more about how an EA can help you get out of email hell? Click here to learn how an EA can ease your email burden and perform other administrative tasks that will allow you to focus on what matters: growing your business.