It’s been a very big week at Mark Ellis Media HQ - for two reasons.
I’ll reveal one of those reasons at the end of this newsletter (don’t go skipping down the page - I saw you!), but the first reason relates to something I revealed in last week’s newsletter.
I’ve given up email. Not entirely, but to the extent that I have removed it from my iPhone, hidden it on my Macs, and don’t look at it until I’m told to by my assistant.
Let me make one thing very clear: this hasn’t been easy. For the last two decades, email has taken control of my working life. It’s been the first (and, often, last) point of contact with everyone of importance, it has operated as a quasi-to-do list, and it has been the arbiter of my attention.
None of that makes sense. Why should an email inbox have such a hold over me? Why should it dictate what I do each day, and to whom I respond? Why have I relied on it for so long to tell me what do to?
Regardless, handing the keys to my inbox to someone else and avoiding checking it every five minutes has called on the deepest reserves of my willpower. I’ve succumbed on a couple of occasions, too - I freely admit. The worry that messages might be slipping through or that the instructions for my assistant hadn’t been clear enough was the culprit each time. Again - daft; Michelle knows exactly what she’s doing, and is far better at managing my email inbox than me.
It’s been a week since I handed over the email reins and something fascinating has happened. I’ve discovered that, although I don’t receive anywhere near as much email as I thought I did, the impact of constantly diving into that inbox was destroying my time and productivity to an extent to which I was completely ignorant.
It’s worth explaining how the new system works. I can’t claim it to be mine, because I nicked it from Dan Martell’s brilliant book, Buy Back Your Time, but I have modified it slightly. My assistant, Michelle, has full access to all of my email inboxes. She checks them periodically each day, and has a bunch of folders into which they need to be filed; one for me if only I can respond, another for emails on which we’re waiting for a response from someone else, one for emails to which she has responded on my behalf, and so on.
Each day, we have a quick catch-up over Zoom, and Michelle tells me what I need to be aware of, or anything to which I need to say “yes” or “no”. She also gives me a heads up on the emails to which I need to respond directly, which I’ll usually action straight after the call. That’s it; that’s the only time I spend on email each day. And it is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Oh, Michelle also looks after my diary now, too - which kinda goes hand-in-hand with email management. She’s the gatekeeper of my time.
As noted above, since Michelle has taken over, it’s clear that the email I receive isn’t that voluminous at all, and, these days, most of it gets filtered through to my General Manager for partnership opportunities, anyway. I don’t need to get involved unless I need to get involved - and that is, again, on a far less frequent basis than I thought. From what I’ve read by business owners who are much further down the path than I, this is how it’s supposed to be. It’s how you grow successful businesses.
However, the most interesting side-effect of this new routine is the impact it has had on my focus and concentration. The constant context-switching that results from momentarily dipping into my inbox throughout the day has been impacting my productivity and mental state far more than I realised. My head now feels far clearer, and I’m finding pockets of time that I didn’t have before. Put simply - it all adds up - big time.
I’m still acclimatising to this new way of running my business and dealing with my own time, but I can confirm that it is categorically the right move. To compound this effort, I have also removed the YouTube Studio app from my iPhone. Yep - that’s the second reason for this being a big week, but rather than dig into that today, I’ll leave you on tenterhooks until next week to report back on that particular change.
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