Episode Summary

While clearing your email inbox may feel productive, it may not be actively moving the needle in your business. Today’s episode of Make Space of More covers the limitations of striving for “inbox zero” as a CEO. Melissa Swink will help you shift your mindset away from mere productivity to actual profitability, advocating for strategic thinking and more effective time management. 

You’ll learn practical strategies for managing your emails, including the use of automation and delegation, as well as the importance of identifying communication traps and busy work, plus ideas for time blocking and auditing your schedule. Tune in for insights into prioritizing high-level tasks that actually drive business growth!

Key Highlights:

• Break free from the "Inbox Zero" mindset: True business growth comes from strategic leadership, not administrative perfection
• Transform your productivity into profitability: Learn to distinguish between busy work and revenue-generating activities
• Master the art of strategic delegation: Empower your team to handle routine communications while you focus on high-level business development
• Implement smart systems: Leverage automation and time-blocking techniques to create sustainable email management practices
• Embrace CEO-level priorities: Discover how boundary-setting and regular schedule audits can maximize your impact as a business leader

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone. Welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about why Inbox Zero won't grow your business. Now, I know, I know, I know. If you've been following me for any given period of time, you may recall that I used to be a huge advocate for Inbox Zero.

I used to model it, I used to talk about it and teach on it. I even have a blog on this still on my website. If you kind of scroll back to some of the older blog posts, you can see there's a blog titled, I Achieve Inbox Zero Every Day. And well, I certainly enjoy having a, what I'll call team inbox, where I feel like I have a sense of kind of where things are at. There's not...

a million unwritten messages, I have kind of a good system in place for maintaining it and keeping it at a manageable level. I no longer have inbox zero every day. I no longer use that as a place that I'm striving to attain. So here's kind of where my thought on this has changed is, you know, while clearing our inboxes may feel productive, and I've certainly fallen into this camp before because

I wanted to get through my inbox in that I wanted to get a good sense of where everything was at. If a client had a question or a team member had a question or if there was anything that we were trying to work together on or if a new prospect was introduced to me or we had a continuing conversation going on with a potential client, you name it. I wanted to be on top of all of those things. And so for a long time, for many years, I put

a huge level of importance on having an empty inbox in that I was up to speed on all the things. But the truth is, is that by striving for inbox zero, it doesn't necessarily mean that we're moving the needle forward. So productivity versus actual profitability are not necessarily one in the same.

And so I know that I have personally been working to shift from being in reactive task management mode into more strategic CEO level thinking and productivity. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. So no matter where you're at with your inbox right now, like maybe you know that you spend way too much time on inbox and email and you are constantly on top of those conversations. You're always checking on your phone and you're available.

24 seven to handle incoming requests, that might be one end that you're on. Or maybe you're like, you know what, my email is out of control. There are thousands of unread emails and it's not something that I have always put a priority on getting organized and teamed to a level of manageability. just, you know what, my email has just become this monster that I just am not quite sure how to deal with.

So no matter what end of the spectrum that you're coming from, I think today's conversation is going to be very, very beneficial for you. So the first thing that we want to identify is why is inbox zero not necessarily the goal? Why has my perspective shifted? Why do I feel now that we're spending way too much time in our inboxes? And I think the problem overall

is that there is a point where we put too much emphasis on productivity and not enough on profitability. So again, when we talk about inbox zero, I know I have spent so much time and energy over the years maintaining a inbox zero, or I would even say like a sane inbox. We'll go ahead and say that. Having a very well maintained inbox and being very quick to

respond to questions that come in and be very timely in my responses. So I had all sorts of strategies wrapped up around inbox zero. To do lists can be another one. Now I am all for having a to do list in that you need to stay focused on the most important things that you can be doing every day. But what I'm talking about is kind of these endless to do lists of all the things that need to get done and not necessarily triaging these things in

a level of, from a level of importance or running it through any sort of triage as to, you who else can be able to help with this. So I'm talking about those long endless to-do lists. Checklists are a similar side of the same coin. I think of to-do lists as miscellaneous tasks and project oriented things that are on my plate versus checklists. I think of those as more routine things that need to be done on a regular basis.

So an example of this, we do use a project management tool, Asana is what we use. And we have several templates in there for say when a new client starts onboarding with us or when we have a team member join us up or if we have an online event that's coming up. We have all these checklists. But the thing is, is that we have built these up, but I don't necessarily as the CEO of my company need to be the one doing

the things on the checklist. So these are all kind of examples of productivity, places where we want to apply the latest in productivity, whether it be different strategies, maybe it's different tools or apps. But in reality, we can optimize these to the nth degree and still not necessarily be growing our businesses. So what we want to do is we want to shift from more of a quality to more of

We want to shift to a quality versus a quantity conversation. We don't want to shift away from quality. We want to do more quality. We want to do less quantity. That's really what this is all about is maybe we need to take a step back from always focusing on how to do more with less. Maybe more is more is more is not actually what we want, but we actually want to be much more strategic about the things that we're doing in the way that we're spending our time.

And the reality is, that effective CEOs aren't trying to do it all. They have a team of people behind them. Their focus is on leadership, building relationships, planning, strategy, and all of those things. They're not the ones who are sitting there going like, how can I respond to 100 more emails a day than I used to be able to? That's ridiculous. They have an assistant who's helping them with that. So when we think about what does an effective CEO need to be able to do,

I would think that we would all agree that having inbox zero is not necessarily in alignment with that. So I will take a step back before we start talking about what to do with this. So we know that we have these tasks that are coming in. We know that we have an endless number of messages coming across our desks on a day-to-day basis. What do we do about all that? I do want to take a little bit of a segue here for a moment just to share and update how

my executive assistant is helping me manage my inbox and to-dos because I'm always looking for more strategy for all of you and how we serve our clients in terms of here's what's working really, really well. And how can you take that and apply that to the work that you're doing on your own with your team, with your clients and what have you. So I have a new executive assistant who started working with me, I think it was in April, May, it was April.

It was April. So she's relatively new. And so when she came on board, I was like, you know, I feel like there's still a lot that can be done in terms of giving me relief in my inbox. And we've tried a variety of different things over the years with, you know, members of my team and such. But ultimately, I actually asked chat GPT. don't even remember the prompt anymore, but I basically said like, hey, I want to be able to use more AI tools.

to run our business more efficiently. And I want to be able to leverage more AI tools to serve our clients more effectively. And Chat basically came back to me and said, I think you need to start internally first. What are some of the things that you're spending the most of your time on? so said, email is definitely one of those things. And I also went through just a couple other communication tools that we're using. And so...

AI actually made some recommendations to how I could use these tools more effectively. And of course it gave me a great start, but then I was able to kind of customize it based on how my brain works and how my business works. So I love using AI and chat GPT, even just to get a starting point where I can kind of take it and run with it from there. So what I've done is I've created some email automations and rules for

emails that are coming in on a regular basis, what to do with those. For example, if a software company emails me the receipt for my subscription for the month, I don't necessarily need a human being opening that and moving that into our accounting receipts folder. I went ahead and took some time and just created some rules. When this type of email comes in from this email address, I want it to go to

this folder. So it took a little bit of time to do that. So you can be thinking about what are some of the things that are coming into my inbox on regular basis that I just need to go ahead and file away. So start thinking about that. So that's the first thing that I did. I have a handful of rules. I have rules for our receipts that are coming in for subscriptions. I have a rule for when my paycheck stub comes in from my bookkeeper. I have a

rule created for the emails from my business mastermind group, my coaching group that I'm in. So I have all these rules created. So that way we're not reinventing the wheel every time that something recurring is coming into the inbox. So that was the first step. And then what my assistant and I have worked together on is creating kind of four working email folders, if you will. Now this is in addition to all the email folders that I have, what I call down below,

where I have all of our client folders, I have all of our team folders, I have different programs that I'm in, just all the different things that need to be filed away. So I can find them if I need to look back on something. But I say we have four main working folders that we're using all the time. And these might not be exact titles, I don't remember them off the top of my head, and I'm certainly not going to open my email in the middle of this podcast and get completely distracted by what's in there. But we have

Action by Melissa, I think is what it says. And so anything that my assistant, when she logs in to manage my email in the morning and throughout the day, anything that comes in that truly I am the only one who can handle and manage, it goes into that folder. And then the second working box that we have,

working folder that we have is client and team FYIs. So these are things that I don't need to take action on, but would be helpful for me to know. Like, hey, so and so is going on vacation and so and so will be filling in. Or this client has decided that they want to go in this direction with their content, they would rather not go in the direction over here. You know, just little updates and things like that. So I read it, I file it away. Like, okay, great, good to know.

And then I have an email or I should say a folder that says Melissa to read. And these are where the newsletters come in. The ones that I have chosen to stay subscribed to that I actually do wanna look through or these are things from maybe my business coach. She sends out a daily email just with kind of a, I guess a food for thought for the day sort of a thing. And so that will go in that folder. So those are just to read.

I know that the Melissa to read folder is not time sensitive. So that can build up over a few days if needed. It's no big deal. The client team FYI is that's just kind of keeping me posted on things that are in the works, like things that are kind of happening in real time. So I will put an emphasis on reading those before the Melissa to read folder. And then lastly, the EA handling folder. So my assistant Janelle,

the things that she is handling, she just funnels over into that folder. So I can see some of the things that she's working on if there's ever a question or kind of what's in the works, what isn't the works, where something is at. And I know that she is handling it. I do not need to handle it. So those are kind of our four working folders. And that has been immensely helpful for being able to go in and triage my inbox very, very quickly.

in the mornings when I log in and throughout the day. And certainly we use Asana to manage our tasks and projects as well, as I've mentioned. So if Janelle sees that there is something that I need to do, she will go ahead and add a task for me in Asana and say, like, see email for details and things like that. Or she might say, you know, follow up with so and so on, you know, regarding this question or, you know, what, what have you. So she's adding those tasks for me in Asana as well.

assuming there's something that she is not able to do. And so overall, I am doing fewer tasks, especially trying to manage all the moving parts and pieces and communications are coming through by email and using my time on more important things. So that is currently how my inbox is set up and how my executive assistant is helping me manage all of those things. So kind of going back to the overall

theme of our episode today with inbox zero, not necessarily growing your business. What we wanna do if you're finding that, you know what, you're right, I'm spending way too much time in my email, and I'm gonna go ahead and say just communications in general, because we have a lot of tools that we're using maybe for you at Slack, or maybe it is your project management tool where there's a lot of comments coming in and that's where your team is communicating.

We use an app called Boxer, which is like a voice messaging app, cuts down on a lot of long emails, a lot of meetings, but still there's messages coming in from all over the place. And so if you're finding that you're just spending way too much time on this and other related tasks, things to that, what we wanna do is we wanna just take a pause and audit where you're spending your time. So I talk a lot about calendar audits, especially at the beginning.

of every year kind of in that December, January timeframe where everyone's kind of evaluating how the previous year went, what we're looking to create this coming year. And so you can certainly check back on some of those episodes on calendar audits and things like that. But now that we're about halfway through the year, it may be a good time to just kind of pause and reassess and do like a mini calendar audit, if you will, like where am I spending my time?

And so what we want to look for, as I mentioned, communication traps, particularly related to today's topic. You know, how much time are you spending in email? How much time are you spending on Slack? How much time are you spending responding to text messages or how much time are you spending, you know, in meetings? That's another one. Are there just way too many meetings on your calendar and you need to start being more decisive in terms of which meetings you truly need to attend?

and even what needs to be a meeting in the first place. Maybe there are more efficient ways of serving your customers or working with your team. So that's a big one to look for, communication traps. Like what are some of the things in terms of communicating with others that are just taking way too much of your time? And often related to that is kind of our low level tasks, our busy work that comes out of that. Like send a follow-up to so and so, or...

Another example here that I like to use is maybe you receive an introduction to a potential client and you say, so-and-so, I'd love to meet with you, and you offer some times to meet, and then you don't hear back from that person, and then you circle back and you offer some fresh times to meet with them because those times are now past, and you just go into the spiral. That's another example of just the ...

the busy work that gets related to these situations. Another example could be that a project is complete and now you need to send out the invoice. Again, if you are in the midst of all this communication and you have, I guess, homework tasks or follow-up tasks related to all that communication, that is a huge part of what we can be looking for here in our calendar audits. And then the most important thing,

Once we gather where is all my communication time spent, what is all the busy work that I'm doing and related to all of that, who can help you streamline and take this off your plate? This may not be something that you can assess on your own. This might be a really great opportunity for you to sit down with your VA and say, hey, I did an assessment of where I'm spending my time. Here are all the things that I'm finding that I'm just spending way too much time on.

or that I feel could be a lot easier or that somebody else might be able to take over and your VA would have, I would hope, have a wealth of ideas and knowledge in terms of how they can help you or different tools and things that can help you to streamline this. It's often very hard to see this for yourself. That's why I say, bring this up in a team meeting. Bring this up when you meet with your VA.

If you don't have a VA or a team that you can bounce these ideas off of, there somebody, is there a business bestie, if you will, or a business coach, or somebody else that you're working with and you respect the way that they do business and they handle themselves, can you review that with them and have them bring up some ideas on how you might be able to solve this problem? Don't do this step on your own. Review what you're doing.

get that list together and bring somebody else into the conversation so you can get some outside advice because it is very difficult often to see the forest through the trees, if you will. So then once we have that conversation and we identify here are some of the things that I need to streamline, here are some of the things that I need to delegate, what we want to do is with that time that we've now freed up, we want to use time blocking in order to prioritize CEO level tasks.

and also to protect that time because when we open up some additional time, the last thing we want is for that to inevitably fill up with all the miscellaneous requests and to-dos and things that you try to get off your plate in the first place. So we want to be on offense, not on defense here. So just a quick recap. What is CEO time? It should be your time spent visioning, planning, doing some strategy work, doing some team development.

having conversations with potential collaborators, things that are actually going to grow your business and make it better versus being kind of in that busy work mode. So those are the big picture, higher level things that we wanna be reserving time on. So are there times of each day, at least an hour that you can devote to some of these things that you can block off on your calendar?

So nobody can take that time, nobody can schedule you during that time so that you can be heads down and looking at the business overall, working on the business versus working in it. So if it's not feasible for you to necessarily block off an hour here or two hours there throughout the course of your week, maybe you wanna consolidate to some theme days, that's another option where maybe you have meetings back to back on

you know, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. And then you reserve Mondays and Fridays for more of your CEO work so that you're not having those interruptions of those meetings. And again, what we want to do here, we want to block the time on the calendar, right? Because if it's not on the calendar, it's likely not going to happen. It doesn't exist. So we want to reserve that time on the calendar. And I have plenty of episodes about calendar blocking and

time blocking, designing CEO work weeks, the ideal CEO work week. There's a lot of episodes about all this. So I'm not gonna go too far down that rabbit hole, but we wanna make sure that we are setting aside that time and being very specific and intentional about how we're spending it. And this is also going to be important that you have the boundaries and the discipline in place in order to honor those time blocks that you have in place. So things could be as simple as,

you're turning off your phone or putting it on Do Not Disturb, closing out of email, or even using something like Boomerang to pause your inbox so it's not bringing in new emails as you're trying to work. This could also be closing your door if you have an office and letting your team know, I'm gonna be heads down until 10 o'clock, and then making sure that you don't have those interruptions, know, little knock knock, got a question for you, or do you have a minute sort of a thing. So the boundaries,

but then also the discipline that you are going to show up as the CEO during that time that you have blocked off and not fill it with things that, putting out fires or reacting to different things that you're actually going to put all of that aside, all the things that are happening and swirling and being heads down and focusing on your business. So I hope that this was helpful for you. I hope that this...

inbox and email management episode was helpful for you in terms of letting go of perfection here, letting go of the need to constantly be looking at how can I do more with less? How can I do more with less? And actually it's not necessarily doing more. It's being highly strategic of the things that you are doing. So if this was helpful for you, please consider subscribing to support the podcast. I'm always happy to have

that support from you and also that just helps to ensure that you don't miss an episode because I am coming to you every week with more tips and tools and strategies to grow your business in a way that is aligned for you. This is not about again doing more about hustling and it's not about the grind. It is being intentional and consistent in growing your business in a way that makes sense for you. So I appreciate you tuning in today and I will be

Back next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Have a wonderful day.