I switched to Mail, the e-mail program that comes with Mac OS X. The program itself works fine, but that’s not the point of this post. While I was cleaning up my mailboxes and transferring them, I realized how much e-mail I had just sitting around, not being deleted, that were completely unnecessary. The problem, I decided, was my use of filters—I had nearly 50 filters to sort e-mail into various boxes. What this meant is that I could just push aside e-mails instead of actually dealing with them.

Nikole’s Inbox, Unfiltered

Before you start laughing about my inbox problem, you have to realize that I have domain ownership or webmaster control over many domains, including my own and those of my clients. This means I get a few hundred legitimate e-mails a day. So what I did to deal with these e-mails in a more efficient way was to create a set of rules for myself to deal with my e-mail:

• Turn off all filters
  In my case, I just didn’t import them. What this did was to make all e-mails go directly into my inbox, every time.
• Implement spam filtering.
  Before switching all of my e-mail accounts to Google Apps for Small Businesses, I used to have to sort through thousands of spam messages every day. Google now catches about 95% of the spam. The flip side of this is that it also catches maybe 2% of legitimate emails, so I go through my spam folder on the Google Apps website once a week to read headlines so that I can send through any non-spam e-mails.
• Answer e-mails as they come in.
  I invoked a bit of Charles Green’s rules for e-mail on this one: As each e-mail comes in, deal with it. This doesn’t mean I have to do the work immediately. It means that I respond with an answer, whether it’s an immediate answer or just a "I’ll do this at such and such time".
• Create actions.
  If I can answer an e-mail immediately and there is no reason to keep the e-mail, I delete it! I know this is a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many e-mails I found cluttering my box that I should have just deleted. If the e-mail contains important information for the project, I put it in a box for that project. (Alternatively, you can just put the information in your project management software or contact management software.) If the e-mail requires work to be done on my part, I add it to my task list.
• Archive e-mail.
  When a project finishes, I put the entire project inbox into an archive folder. This way, if I need it 6 months from now, I can find it—but it’s not cluttering my e-mail program on a daily basis.

So how is this going? I started out with an inbox of about 2,500 e-mails. I’ve now been able to maintain it under 100 for over a month, so I think I’m doing pretty well!

Reader Question

What do you do to keep your inbox under control? Do you delegate like Tim Ferriss? Respond to everything like Charles Green? (For a review on the difference, see here.) Or do you have your own set of rules for your e-mail?

In the end, it had nothing to do with the aesthetics or the influence, but with clarity. I simply felt the ads were distracting me from my true, internal reasons for having this site, and I couldn’t let that happen. The ads were removed, my purpose for this site has been reaffirmed, and all order has been restored.

Which brings me back to my continued goal of Less for 2008: Less Noise. By taking the time to reflect on my true goals and eliminate outside influences in my decision, I came up with the right decision for me—and that is what "less noise" is all about.

What is noise? Noise is the activities going on around you, the distractions hiding your message, the things keeping you from your focus, clarity, and true self.

Reducing Actual Noise

I don’t know how anyone works from a coffee shop. I suppose if I had some sort of writer’s block, I might head to one to energize myself to get going again—but for the most part, that amount of action and sound is completely distracting to someone trying to work. Instead, I work from home, where I can have the house as quiet as I want and not have to worry about my silence being invaded. If controlling your environment is not possible, try these ideas:

• Don’t listen to music.
  I know someone is going to come on here and tell me how their music makes them work better, but for the most part, it does not. (The one exception might be music without lyrics, played softly, but even that is not always effective.) What happens in reality is that your brain is going into overload trying to stay on task while also processing the words to the song and whatever else is going on. This kind of mutiltasking actually makes you slower and more prone to mistakes. So turn that music off and learn how to enjoy the silence.
• Wear earplugs.
  If you have no choice but to work in an office or a noisy location, bring some earplugs with you. Of course, don’t use them in any situation that might be dangerous, such as while riding a bike or driving a car, but feel free to use them when your yackity cube mate just won’t shut up.
• Soundproof your home office.
  Even if you don’t live near an airport or a busy freeway, reducing the noise in your environment can help you concentrate better and reduce your stress levels. There’s strong evidence to support the idea of noise inhibiting learning and causing stress, such as this study on children and noise done by my alma mater, Cornell University.

Quieting the Noise in your Head

External noise isn’t the only thing distracting you. For many entrepreneurs, the constant swirl of ideas and passions makes concentration nearly impossible. To clear your head so that you can concentrate more, try these new habits:

• Use a notebook system.
  It doesn’t matter if it’s an actual notebook with a pen, 20 notebooks, bits of scrap paper, or a file on your computer: writing things down will get them out of your head and make room for you to process the things you are currently working on. Think of it as a mental filing system—by putting your thoughts on paper, you allow your mind to free itself of the burden of trying to remember them. Many people love the Getting Things Done system for this.
• Find a quiet place.
  Some people go for walks, meditate, or practice yoga; I do all my best thinking in the shower. The purpose of this is to find a space in which you are free of noise and distractions in order to internalize your thoughts and solve your current challenges. When I am under the greatest work stress, I have gotten a great deal of clarity out of hot shower or a extra-long run.
• Listen to yourself.
  Many times, a struggling business owner will seek out the answers to get through the next dip by hiring consultants, callings colleagues, or spending hours on Google. These activities often add to the noise and stress, not reduce it. Instead, try internalizing your search and reflecting on your current progress and goals. You may find that you have more of the answers than you think! This process also allows you to adapt your business to current challenges while avoiding any "me too" behaviors or opinions that will draw you away from the core of your business.

Taming the Electronic Noise

All of the electronic devices we depend on can add to the noise in our lives that is keeping us from greater productivity. To tame that beast, turn it off! You can live for an hour or 2 without checking e-mail, IM, Twitter, or your phone messages. There are very few times in life where picking up the phone on the first ring is actually important.

Eliminating Behavioral Noise

In my next post in this series, I will go more into the nuts and bolts of eliminating unnecessary activities and actions from your daily life. For now, focus on time management and wasting less time as a way of eliminating behavioral noise—by removing unnecessary actions from your daily life, you will help eliminate the noise from your business as well.

Filling the Noise Void

What happens when the noise is gone from your life? Your signal to noise ratio increases, making the message and path of action more clear for you. That is the goal—to help your brain eliminate or reduce the noise in your life in order for the true message to come through clearly. The entire process of eliminating noise from your life will help you to achieve clarity and confidence in your business strategy and execution.

A Note About This Series

In case you missed it, this series started with Less, Part 1: Time.

Photo by BarelyFitz.

Part 1: Wasting Less Time

When I think of time management, I don’t think of scheduling every minute of my day. Instead, I think of eliminating the things in your daily activities that don’t hold meaning and making room for the things that are important to you. Eliminating time wasters will make you a better and more productive entrepreneur. I’ve processed through my own life and the stories I’ve heard from colleagues, and identified some time wasters that I do during the day. Some of these may be funny to you, but I’m trying to be as honest as possible in order to help you identify and eliminate the time wasters in your own life.

Phone Calls

I once had this guy call me who went off for nearly 45 minutes—and I swear he did it without a single breath. As the conversation was really only good for the laugh I had retelling the story to a friend of mine, I found myself wishing I could have redone that hour of my life and let the voicemail pick up the second time around. Don’t get sucked into that trap. Your time is precious and you don’t have enough extra to be wasting with useless people or telemarker sales calls.

Action items: Keep important phone calls on task and schedule them to not interrupt your work flow. If you work alone, don’t pick up the phone for a number you don’t recognize; let it go to voicemail. Learn the art of ending a conversation better than I can, and get off the phone when you get stuck talking to a blowhard.

Personal Tasks

When you work from home, like many of my readers do, you can easily get caught up in personal tasks that suck up your work day. Don’t. Save your cleaning, shopping, decorating, laundry, childcare and other personal tasks for non-work hours. Those dishes will still be there in 2 hours when you call it quits for the day, so don’t use them as a reason to procrastinate on a project.

Action item: Set regular work hours, and use those hours only for work-related activities.

E-mail

Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek) says that you can triple your productivity by eliminating your e-mail overload. If elimination isn’t possible, perhaps you can take advice from Scoble on how to process all of it better. The connection between these two is that e-mail is a horrible time waster, and the only way to gain back that time is to tame the e-mail beast without hurting your business.

Action items: Become an e-mail ninja. Don’t send e-mail first thing in the morning. Schedule times to check email throughout the day, but not every 5 seconds when you are trying to procrastinate. If you need to write a long explanation, maybe it’s faster to pick up the phone and do it verbally.

Craigslist

Now, there are many reasons to use Craigslist: I have used this site to find new homes for my daughter’s outgrown toys, hire an artist, and look for freelance writing jobs. But if you can spend an hour laughing at the "Best Of" or half a day in one of the forums, then you’ve really lost sight of the big picture.

Action item: If you must use Craigslist, just find what you are looking for, and get out.

Bargain Hunting

I always laugh when I see someone go to purchase a new piece of office equipment, such as a scanner, and they go to 10 different stores to try to find the lowest price. In the amount of time you spent trying to save $5, you could have been spending 4 more hours working. I love a good deal just as much as the next guy, but not if it’s going to suck up my entire day.

Action item: Use tools such as Google Product Search, PriceWatch, or PriceGrabber to know what prices are before you buy, even if you are just going into the store. Many brick and mortar retails also have online versions with in-store pickup so you can compare pricing before you get into your car.

Daydreaming

I’ll confess: I actually spent an hour today looking at housing for a place we may not be living in for another 6-12 months. While daydreaming is nice, it’s not very productive.

Action item: Table that daydreaming until the day when you are actually able to put your plan into action. If you must do it anyway, use a timer to keep it short or you may spend all day playing on the internet.

Learning

I have heard from many entrepreneurs in the initial start-up phase that the learning curve is very steep. The real question is, are you really learning anything? I’m sure you can easily spend a few hours on a tangent surfing the web for affiliate marketing on the internet, but will that help you or your business in any sort of way? If not, don’t do it.

Action item: Delegate tasks when you can: Hire a bookkeeper instead of teaching yourself accounting, for example. If you need to educate yourself in a topic, find one or two sources that can be a regular source of information in that particular subject matter and use that to get answers instead of spending hours searching Google.

Blogs

Robert Scoble reads hundreds of blog feeds every day, and I think he’s nuts. I’m with Rob May when he says that you just don’t need all of that information—it isn’t really making your life any better anyway.

Action item: Look at your list of RSS feeds. Which ones have really helped you in your business, and which ones just produce a lot of fluff pieces? Use your RSS program to sort the ones that are regular must-reads or just eliminate the non-useful feeds out of your program.

The All-Encompassing Question

There are some valuable time wasters, such as when I take a shower to clear my head when I find myself mentally stuck. The trick is knowing whether or not that activity is hurting you or helping you. If you find yourself wasting time at any point in the day, just ask yourself: Is this activity going to add value or meaning to my life? If the answer is no, don’t do it.

Photo by FABIOLA MEDEIROS.