The Course Creators

Podcast

Ep. 41 | Keeping Your Admin and Email Inbox Organised with Yaro Starak

The Course Creators

Podcast

Ep. 41 | Keeping Your Admin and Email Inbox Organised with Yaro Starak

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Ep. 41 | Keeping Your Admin and Email Inbox Organised with Yaro Starak

Hands up who has a crazzzyyyy email inbox?! Lets Talk Inbox ZERO!! I’m here with @Yaro Starak from “Inbox Done” for some tips and tricks on staying sane, organised and a little less “arrrgghhhhh” in the admin department! Listen to the episode below.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Your email deserves the attention of someone who is either calm enough or not you ideally, in this case that that’s their job. Right. So they can sit there. And I hate to say it the be better than you at email in some ways, right? Because that’s their job. They have the time they’re in your inbox every [music] day.

Hello, and welcome to today’s tip, which is all about Inbox Zero. Um, now hands up, who’s got a crazy Inbox? Um, I try not to have a crazy Inbox, actually. I’m a massive fan of Inbox Zero. But do you know what sometimes it happens and I think everyone at the moment, they’ve just gone through Christmas. So I’ve just had the kids at home for a year. Thanks COVID! And I think a lot of people that kind of got behind on the whole admin thing. And yeah, I find that Inboxes full of stuff and piling up to-do lists do actually affect us in here. When there’s already high anxiety, risk of depression, people who are out of their normal routines and things like that. Um, yeah, adding on this, um, noise in this mess with messy inboxes is something that I am definitely trying to avoid. Now. I’m so excited today. Hi Yaro. We’ve got Yaro here. How are you?

Hi Sarah? I’m good. Thanks for having me.

All the way from Montreal in Western Australia today. We actually met five years ago in San Diego at the Thrive Make Money Matter event. Um, so we were just saying, I can’t believe five years is already gone past.

I’m glad you have a daughter to keep track of how many years passed. Cause I would not remember otherwise.

Absolutely insane how quickly time’s gone now. I’m really excited because today we’re just going to have a bit of a chat about, um, Inbox Zero. Now, and for everyone who doesn’t know Yaro, he’s the co-founder of Inbox Done, uh, which is a service that helps entrepreneurs, business owners and organizations keep that inbox clear. Basically, responded to without you having to go in and repeat yourself every day and deal with those customer queries questions. And I’m sure Yaro you’ll tell us a bit more about that in a second. Um, so come on, like tell us, like, why is it that, you know, you’ve literally dedicated your entire business to helping people manage their inbox? Why is this so important?

Well, I mean like probably most people watching here, I had a small business, like the first time I experienced this was being a victim of too much emails. So I had a, my first actually I call it my first real business online. It was an online editing and proofreading company and I was going for that Tim Ferriss, four hour work week kind of vibe, where you could have a lot of free time travel, do all that. And this was before Tim even wrote his book. So I was just, you know, there was nothing to really. Study or learn about. And I just did the usual look at my time and how I was spending it. And I noticed email was really the main constraint. It was the thing I spent most of my time on it’s a bit like a virtual to-do list. Whatever came in the inbox was what I had to do that day.

You know, I sort of worked through those. Um, So really to, to experience that type of freedom, I knew I had to hire someone to do email. And now back then, I just literally thought who of my friends could I possibly offer work too? And it was a university friend at the time and she was about to have her first child. And I said, listen, do you want to work from home job? And I don’t know if it’ll work. Uh, I have never handed my email over to someone else, but we, we did an experiment. And within about a month she was handling about 95% of the emails that would come to my business and even, you know, everything really.

So it was a, it was a breakthrough moment. And I’ll be honest that that experience made me think this is something other people probably need, but obviously I was, you know, running that business. And then I got into the blogging and, you know, information marketing world. I had someone or multiple people at, at some points, uh, handling email. But I always thought in the back of my head, this is clearly something that more people need. And it is amazing how many times you, you speak to a business owner who’s successful and they say I’m drowning in email. It’s like a by-product of being successful.

I can so relate to that. And I’ve always been a fan of, you know, finding smarter people than me or people that love doing the stuff that I hate doing. And I’ve, I’ve hired staff and contractors for many years. Um, but one of the things that I had never handed over was my email inbox, because being a business owner, I kind of had this thing in my head where it’s like, well only I am going to be able to answer that question. Only I am going to be able to respond to this particular question. Only I can deal with X, Y, and Z type of issues. And I did a similar thing, you know, I started getting really into systemization automation and realized quite quickly that there’s actually nothing that we can’t teach people how to do. Um, I think it’s sometimes it’s quite obnoxious of us to think that only we can respond to a particular question.

Um, for me, the biggest challenge was because I provide services. So my services are, I help people create online courses. And at one point in time, I was running that in a really customized way. So I sort of, you know, every project would be tailored to what that particular customer needed. And so I kind of had put myself in a situation where only I could kind of work out the costing for giving quotes, you know, and that’s in my email inbox at the time. That was what a lot was filling it up with. Can I have a quote for X, Y, and Z, and every single cake looked different that we had to bake basically. Um, and so then I thought, well, yeah, If I do think of it, like baking cakes, um, you know, you can have muffins, you can have chocolate cakes, you can have flapjacks. Yeah. I kind of looked at it like that. There’s still going to be a process as to, well, how much are oats? How much is honey? How much is sugar? How much is icing? How much, you know, how much do I have to pay the person who mixes it? How much is it? Cost me to run the oven. And I thought, surely I can systemize this so that I can hand over. People doing my quoting and responding to these inquiries.

And so, um, I literally sat down and I kind of wrote down three packages. And then what was able to cost that out and break it down like a menu. So I, you know, like you imagine your starters and your main courses and your desserts. I literally broke down everything that we did, um, as part of a course creation process and let people in the quote process choose what bits they wanted, like a pick and mix salad bar, you know, and each of that was priced out behind the scenes. So then I can hand that over. I had my baby, my second baby, um, just under a year ago now. And for me, that’s when I said to myself, I need to now hand this over. Like, I need to give my inbox to somebody else because I realized, like you say, with only a few hours a day with my newborn baby, I had available.

I was spending all those hours, just replying to emails and not actually doing any income generating work. I thought if I keep this up, I won’t have a business anymore because, because I’m the one that’s creating the content. I’m the, I’m the expert. I’m the only one that can actually do the videos and the course. So, um, that’s when I found my very own thing, godmother, who’s managing my email inbox now. And I tell you what, I would never look back like hiring organizations like yourselves or, or staff to do these things. It has changed my life. Um, enabled me to take on a lot more students. So for me, obviously, that was one of the things that helped me was creating those systems.

What tips do you have for business owners and entrepreneurs about where do you even begin? Like, let’s say I’ve seen some people screenshot in my group, like. 13,000 unread messages in the inbox?

Well, I mean, I actually loved her to reverse the question back to you first, before I answer that. I’m curious, you went through the process of handing over your email pretty recently. Maybe you can even remember what was the hardest part or what was the hesitation or the challenge you found? Um, cause I know I had it the first time I had the fear of trusting someone. Uh, I didn’t know whether they could be me. Like you said, whether they’d have the knowledge and the skill set. I love that you talk about turning services into products. Because I think, um, doing this process of learning how to optimize and systematize a business forces you to go. Yeah, there are some areas here where I could simplify, and then that allows me to delegate. So if I can turn complex services that are bespoke and all over the place with quotes and you know, back and forth with potential clients too, there’s option A, B, and C.

And then when you’ve done that you can bring on a team and say, listen, we only sell a, B and C. I can teach you how to close the deals and you can actually have your team making money for you while you’re doing, like you said, other activities to grow your business. So I love the process of this kicks off, but I’m sure you went through some fears handing over emails. So before I give you my tips, w what did, what was it like for you?

Today? Well, I actually wasn’t scared at all. I couldn’t wait! Hang on a minute. You want to do my emails for me? She was like, I would love to help you out. I was like, all right, give me three minutes. So I’ll give you access to the account? I was that excited, but yeah, it was a really interesting process for me because, you know, I thought, you know, we have all these different questions. We get asked, it’s going to take her years to be able to, um, you know, sort of start taking over all these different things. It’s going to take so long for me to give it to her. Um, and then when I went through my inbox, basically what I did is I just went through the process of just re re going back through and rereading, um, a couple of, hundred of the last emails that I had.

And although they were all worded slightly differently, the same kind of 10 to 15 questions were being asked over and over and over and over again, it just slightly different ways. And I was like, right, well, I’m preparing for this new employee to start, you know, I think she was literally starting the next day. Cause I was so excited that she was up for it. And that what I did is I basically created, and in fact, I might share my screen because I’ve probably got it here to show you. Um, I created a sheet of the most commonly asked questions in my inbox. So in fact, I’m going to pull this up and share it because it’s always easier to do, to show rather than tell. And I think manage Sarah’s inbox and you’ll see if I can find it and then share my screen with you when it comes up.

I didn’t realize that this was a, the perfect timing to talk to you about this subject, Sarah, this is so

I, right. So here we go. Let’s do a share screen. And pull this up here. So, uh, hopefully can see my screen up here now. So what I actually did is I created task 193 Manage Sarah’s email inbox, which is…

and you’re 193. What is that? Is there 192 that before this, or…

There are 192 tasks before this, and there’s about 300 other tasks after this as well. I hear we got the main goals. Your goal is to answer all customers’ inquiries, questions in less than 24 hours. And to make everyone feel like the most love supported, special VIP ever. So then what I did is I’ve just put down here, common email queries. Um, the common question or query and the ref response to give. So I went in and prepared this. I went through my inbox, went through about two to 300 emails and I got them to, and I wrote down, you know, the different variations of the same question and I pre-prepared an answer for her to go in and then copy and paste. So most of them are, you know, what, what, which one of your things should I go for? What’s the difference between your offerings? Um, you know, do I have to have this particular software? How do I work with you? Do I need these things to be able to work with you? Um, so they are, they were the same questions that just kept coming up over and over and over again, as you can see, as they were 22 eight, four pages that I’ve created here and prefilled in the answer so that when I took, um, my, um, PA on, um, I was actually in a position to, um, Let me hand it over so she can just copy and paste the money that.

Sarah, you are the ideal client. If we had clients who all did that, then it was certainly making the job easier. But it’s funny because we. Will you step in and do basically what you just did, but we attempt to build that for people. So as you can imagine, a lot of those emails have already been answered in the past that you can jump into the sent folder and usually extract basically what you just showed us.

You know, the answers to the most common questions build a knowledge base is what we call it. You know, a system for running someone else’s inbox, someone else’s business almost. Um, and that I think is probably half the benefit, not just a human being replying to the messages, but a human being, having built that knowledge base for you. So that even if, um, You know, circumstances, change someone leaves. You always have that available for the next person to just take over. And if you sell your business one day, it’s there running without you. So I think it’s an amazing thing you did, but she’s taken a bit of time to put that together. Right.

But how many hours is it now save me for the rest of my life. And what I found was really cool about that. Doing that exercise actually was the, um, you know, I realized that it was not, it was improving the quality of our responses and standardizing the responses to everyone because you know, sometimes you’re sat in your computer you’re nice and focused, you’re feeling nice and calm, and you do respond to that query really in-depth. And you put lots of information in there. And for me, particularly at that, at that time, as I was transitioning and handing this over. You know, I literally had a newborn baby and a three-year-old and, you know, they said there were some days where I’m like, baby on one group. I got a kid in the other arm. I’m, you know, I’m standing on Lego. I’m late for daycare.

And, you know, I was trying to like voice type a quick reply to these emails that were just, it was just poorly, poorly put over. And now that I taken the time to respond properly to these queries, and then now set there. Everyone gets the full, proper sense-making response that enables them to make a decision as to whether they continue a conversation or, you know, preferably become a client. So it’s really, I believe helped me up my game by going through this process and thinking like this, you know, it might just be me and my spare room, but I’m running a business. I’m running a professional business and a professional service that I’m charging people for. It needs to be better. And doing this handing over of the inbox has definitely, definitely made that happen.

Oh, I love it. And I love the focus you are saying there. It’s like your, your email deserves the attention of someone who is either calm enough or not you ideally, in this case that that’s their job. Right. So they can sit there. And I hate to say it the be better than you at email in some ways, right? Because that’s their job. They have the time they’re in your inbox every day. Sure. They can’t replicate you in the sense of have all your experience at your core skillset. But they can certainly extract a lot of what, you know, in, from your information from existing email. Maybe a few conversations with you to pull out any missing pieces, but then you’ve got a person who can, like you said, give the best reply. Can follow up. Can keep track and be, uh, a sort of a version of you that is optimized for email. Uh, and that’s, that’s kind of why, what we do Inbox Done exists was to turn that into a service. Um, but of course, like you, I went through this experience myself and I think. One of the best things for anyone who’s kind of watching who does have an inbox now that is like 13,000, 15,000. We’ve we’ve seen over a hundred thousand for some people. Which is crazy.

Yeah. I mean, we have a promise to get you down to inbox zero, but I will give away a bit of a secret. We’re not going to sit there and it’s a hundred thousand emails. Cause that would be ridiculous. But you know, often what you can do is just archive everything. But the most recent 100 emails. And then use that as a starting point. And of course everything is archived. So it’s in there. You can go in and search for something if you’re missing it. But by having that starting point of maybe your most recent hundred, you start building that database of what is most recent and current. But I went through this too. So when I hired my inbox managers, as we call them, what I did first was even before I hired them, I just went into my inbox and I looked at what I had in there to do and ask myself, am I the best person to answer or handle every message in there? And I could go through and I would see, okay… This is a newsletter that can be put away to read once a month or once a week. This is a software update that should be for someone else to do the update. Um, this is a customer query, but it’s a basic question. How to find this resource, or do you sell this? I don’t need to be the one doing that.

And maybe like one out of 15, 20, 30, where like very unique questions that I might need to pop in and answer directly. But almost all of it could just be handed over to different, like one person who could then solve the problems for me, basically that are generated by those emails. And when I did that, I was like, “Why haven’t I done this sooner?” Because I just spend most of my time in there. So after doing that, I realized, okay, I can bring someone in. I can create the knowledge base like you did. This is how to deal with all these common situations, you know, pass this on to the accountant. Pass this onto the tech person. Put this in this folder. Let’s build a filter so that automatically goes to that folder, you know, create some optimizations, some systems.

And then of course the question, and this is why I asked you like how you felt about doing it. For me, it was like, “Can I trust someone else?” Like I’m worried I will lose potential customers or they will screw up. And, you know, someone will ask for a refund where they may not have otherwise if it was me being there. So I remember going through that first handover and then carefully watching month, two and month three, as they replied. It was funny. I started watching the replies and I went actually, in most cases, they’re doing a better job than I did, because like you said, this is their job. So they’re actually, they’re applying much quicker than I did with more detail than I did and doing it multiple times. When I, in my back of my mind, I’m like not following up well enough. I know I’m dropping the ball and I’m potentially losing customers. So yeah. It was a real sense of relief, but then also a bit of excitement because suddenly you wake up in the morning and email’s not your job, so you can ask yourself, well, I can write that book I always wanted to write, or I can look for new marketing opportunities to grow what I’m doing, or I can go to the gym. All these other things you can do. So I think the change is huge, but for some reason it’s not the most common thing people think to outsource. I think there’s a real bit of a roadblock with letting go of that part.

Yeah. I’d love to actually hear, we’ve got some people on the stream. I’d love for you to just look at your phone right now and tell us how many emails have you got in your inbox? I did this in my Facebook group the other day, and people were screenshotting, you know, the little pop-up number on there. And I was like, I’m literally, I would literally have a heart attack if I had some of the numbers these people have for me. If I have over 25 emails in my inbox, I like literally have a nightmare. I can’t sleep. I have to deal with it. Because I’ve just had the Christmas period. My husband’s been working the whole of Christmas. I’ve had the kids home. I think I have 64 in my inbox at the moment. And this for me is like anxiety-inducing panic.

Where’s your, where’s your email manager? Are they not on there? Or…

so she stayed on top of all of her work and she keeps messaging me because I haven’t replied to them.

Oh, you’re the one who’s slowing down. Right.

Right. 200 emails. There might be sort of two or three that really only I can deal with, which is great. Right. You know, if you’re taking away 97% of your work? Um, it’s well worth it. I was, we’ve got some people. Tricia has got 67,683 emails in your inbox. Get that girl a vodka. I would need a bottle together.

Yeah, that is stressful.

So I’m in that, I’m in that post-Christmas backlog at the moment where I have very unusually I’m over 60 emails in there, which for me is crazy. Uh, yeah. Trisha is extremely overwhelming when you kind of have that sense there. Um, one of the things I love to do is first of all, just go in and mass unsubscribed to the junk because I imagine, you know, 60 60,000 of that might be junk Tricia. Um, I, there’s a couple of tools out there that you can use. Um, I came across one a while ago called, um, unroll.me. Yup. Yeah. Um, basically it’s a free for those of you never heard of unroll.me. It’s a free tool that allows you to connect your inbox to it. And it shows you all of the email lists. You’re subscribed to, and you can just mass go, unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe, all in one big screen. Um, so that might be a good start to just get out and get it out. Obviously don’t unsubscribe from SarahCordiner.com.

Um, but that’s a good one. So what else, you know, obviously you, this is what you help people do every single day. And I think the part that’s really challenging for people is actually sitting down and getting those responses written up, which I think is one of the most valuable parts of your service, because we have so much going on. We’re so distracted. I think having, you know, the accountability of a manager to sit with and just finally get that done is so powerful. But, um, what, what are the tips? You know, if the people here that are messaging us right now saying you’ve got thousands and thousands, where should they start?

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you can do this yourself, you’re obviously it’s a challenge because it is entirely up to you. So I always think the ultimate solution is at the clone. You need that other person stepping in and doing it for you, but you can certainly can make your life a little bit easier. Like you said, with the tool, like on Romy and that starts to remove some of the emails. I’m a big fan of triage. I think this is one of the best things you can do. Is to look at your inbox and create a triage system, or in other words, a prioritization systems. So, you know, right now there’s an 80 20 rule. There’ll be a certain number of emails that actually do matter. Like they might be a potential customer, a current customer, a potential partner for a marketing thing, and a massive opportunity for exposure or, you know, a new sales or whatever. So, you know, that’s number one. That needs to be answered today as soon as possible.

But then you go down, this is a bunch of emails that maybe you need to reply to, but Hey, once a week is fine. And then there’s a, probably the majority that need to be put somewhere where you can scan through. If you want to open up a newsletter and read that one. Great, you know, open up, Sarah’s read hers, but everything else just. Can put it away and not worrying about it. So you don’t see it in the inbox. It’s something to get rid of. And I think filters is one of the simplest solutions for doing that. You know, you can create some rules where all the newsletters go into a folder and we actually do this for one of our clients.

He was like, I never want to go into my inbox ever again. So I went out completely. But I don’t want to, I don’t want to lose it, touch with my industry. And I get a lot of content from some people I follow, you know, like he, he follows his own mentors, like, like you are Sarah, and he doesn’t want to lose that content.

So what we do is actually create a, uh, a summary. So yeah. Throughout the week, uh, newsletters come in, we put them into a folder and we grabbed them, sticking them into one document and we drop that into a Slack chat for him once a week. I’ll just read through that, skim it, take the notes out of what he cares about. He never has to go into the inbox and feel that sense of this is what I have to do. So that’s one of the ways that, and you can do that as well. You know, put everything into that newsletter folder. I used to have like a uh, Yaro urgent folder. A Yaro to read folder and then like a newsletter folder. And that was what I did before I had a human being step in and actually start replying and organizing for me.

I think one of the other things to do is, um, folders are a bit of a trick. I think a lot of people know how to make a folder or a label in Gmail, but often what you’ll do is you’ll start creating lots and lots of these labels and folders, and it kind of feels good to move an email into them. Like it’s going away. But you end up getting 20, 30, 40 of these that you never go back into again. And then it becomes as big a mess as the actual inbox. So often reducing the number of folders and labels to only the set, maybe five, maybe 10, that you’re actually going to use on a regular basis. And if somebody doesn’t fit into those folders, you’ve got to ask yourself, is that email actually important? Maybe that needs to be unsubscribed from. You don’t need to be getting every single email that comes at you.

Um, so that’s, that’s where I’d start. Triage, um, filtering folders, all email clients have that as a function. Um, we also use Yesware. There’s a few tools like that. It’s a plugin for Gmail, right? This gives you more ability for doing templates and canned responses. So we usually use it for most of our clients as well, because it allows us to really come up with some robust knowledge base so that, you know, The question comes in, find the template, reply, bring it in, customize it, tailor it to that person, then send the message. So it kind of puts a system in place that’s more advanced than the built-in templating system of say Gmail or outlook. So we like, we like Yesware as well.

Yeah, I love those tools. Um, and I mentioned that canned response thing there as well, or, um, because I think that was something for me that really started to change the amount of time I was spending, applying to emails. I don’t think a lot of people are aware that you can do it in Gmail.

Um, basically a canned response for those who’ve never heard of this before is when you, um, pre-write sort of a template of reply. Let’s see, you kind of get the same question. Come up a lot. You can pre-write your reply and save it inside your Gmail as a canned response. Again, I’ll do another quick screen share here with you.

Uh, just so everyone can, um, check out what we mean here. So I’ll just pop into my Gmail. So from Gmail, I’m messaging from my company, a domain. And let’s say I’m creating a new email here down at the very bottom of your email area. You have three little dots. And you can click on templates and you can see here, I’ve got all of my different templates in here. So, um, these are all preset, his, uh, his, uh, old quote one. Um, it pre-fills it. Now it even, pre-fills the, uh, this is the subject area and it pre-fills the whole entire email. So as you can see again, really powerful, um, ways for you to just quickly save time that would have taken me five minutes to reply to, but canned response, boom done in seconds.

Yeah, I love them. I think that’s probably the best thing you can start doing from day one, if you’re doing it yourself, for sure.

Yeah. Amazing. Well, this is, um, I’m loving the tips in here. So you’ve mentioned some of the services that you guys provide, but to, I see that your name’s at the bottom of the screen there. So if you guys want to just go to InboxDone.com and get in touch with the man himself, um, I’m sure that they have a very automated way. You find out what you need to do.

Yeah, you actually jumped on a phone call with me if you want to do a discovery call. If you’re in the right situation to, to bring on an inbox manager. Um, some of the things I think worth mentioning, because for me, this was one of the, the failures I felt in my own businesses over the years was before I had someone else doing it was the sense of. I have someone email in requesting a refund or a cancellation, and I’d be like, I feel like I could convince them to stay.

If I just could spend some time with him, you know, answer their questions, find out what’s the blocking them. And often that would take some emails back and forward. But I, if I have 10 of those coming in, plus all the other emails, I just really couldn’t do a good job of doing that. And on the flip side, you might have someone coming in asking a question about a product and they’re almost ready to buy, but they have one question or they need to have a little bit of a dialogue back and forward, or maybe you to need to follow up with them. You know, five emails over two weeks might be enough to bring them. Over the line. And again, I felt like I was dropping the ball, doing that process. So if that’s you, it’s one of these kind of situations where you can basically get the service for free because your inbox manager steps in, they save cancellations.

Those people stay customers, they chase up potential customers and bring them in for you. So you’re making money. So if you, if you’re feeling that way, I think that’s one of the. Best reasons to bring on an inbox manager because it actually helps to grow your business. So I know that was a stress point for me. And it’s a stress point for anyone succeeding. Really? It’s it’s, it’s Al it just gets bigger and bigger job over time.

Yeah, that’s definitely, I can see that myself, you know, um, in the last few months alone, we’ve, we’ve got well over 60,000 new students or something along those lines. Um, ju the last 12 months, purely because I have been able to move away from doing that daily tedious admin and actually move into being here being present with people. Being able to create new courses that I can sell and make money from being able to create new information products I can sell and make money from. Being able to be here in my communities and share information, um, and, and have these conversations. And that, that, that is the difference.

So that you free yourself from that prison, that little cave, where you’re like, eh, and actually come out into the daylight where people can see you and hear you. Experience you and go, wow, I want to buy from you. Um, it’s, it’s completely revolutionary. And I think, like you said, at the very beginning of this call, people really underestimate the power of releasing yourself from your inbox.

So you just relax. I’m also a big fan of handing over social media, direct messaging, because I think. A lot of people are getting their, their new email as a, an Instagram DM, or a Twitter DM or Facebook DM. Um, so there’s, yeah, I’m sure you get a lot through there as well. So, you know, wherever your customers or potential customers are, you can put this person in front and just offer better customer service.

So, you know, it’s not for anyone, if you’re just brand new, you’re just focusing on getting your first customers. Right. But if you’re already succeeding, you’re kind of a victim of your own success. I think it’s one of the best things you can do for like mental freedom. Like you said, you know, just to take a step back and go, okay. Not every single job in this business is my responsibility anymore. So I never looked back. I actually handed over my email 12 years ago with that editing and proofreading company. Right. When I got into blogging and podcasting, I immediately had someone take over email as soon as I had the cash flow for it. So I just haven’t had the feeling of, um, an inbox that’s calling my name, creating that stress all the time. So I can’t go back. It’s like flying first class. Once you do that, you know, coach never feels the same.

That’s so true. I love that. So you’ve got Trisha said I’m such a fan, even information I’m so overwhelmed. I can’t look at it. It freaks me out Trisha that if I was in your situation, which I was at one point, um, the first, the first thing to do is just go and delete all the junk. Um, for me, I found the easiest way to do that is to reorganize the inbox from A to Z, because then you can have, you know, you might have 500 of those messages that just Facebook notifications and you can just mass highlight and mass delete in one go.

So I personally go A to Z and then mass delete from each certain providers and then go and unsubscribe. So you don’t get any more of those ones come in and then start going through and seeing, is there anything you actually need to reply to if you don’t need to reply to it, just archive, archive, archive, and hopefully out of that 67,000, there might only be 10 or 20 that you actually need to deal with today.

I mean, you could just go select all and click archive if you’re really brave, you know, if it’s really important, they’ll email you again. You know, it’s one of those things that gets you to inbox zero straight away. It’s, it’s a, you know, it’s a risky one, but it’s sometimes a good way to start.

Yeah. Sometimes you just got to start from scratch in cleaning.

It’s been amazing to chat with you about this today and of course to catch up after so long of not seeing you. Um, thank you for the tips. We’ve had lots of comments already popping up in the, in the thread here, just saying, thank you really helpful. So that’s awesome and of course, go to InboxDone.com if you’d like to have a chat with Yaro and his team about, um, handing over your inbox to somebody. If not, um, maybe your to-do list today is to get into that inbox, give it a cleanup and see if you can get down to zero. If you do, I’d love to hear the number you started with in the comments in your inbox. And when you get to zero. Screenshot that beautiful empty page and share it with us in the comments area. It’s a very good feeling. Love it. Thank you, Yaro.

Yeah. Thanks for having me and good luck with those 60,000 new students. That’s you got a big job ahead of you.

I love it. It’s my favorite thing in the world. Beautiful. All right guys. And, uh, if you would like any tips about creating content, building your online business at don’t forget to grab your free Course Creation Starter Kit at sarahcordiner.com/starterkit. And that will help you learn how to take your knowledge out of your head, turn it into a digital product so that you can help people and make money on autopilot. And we’ll see you again real soon for more [music] lovely guests like Yaro that way. And lots more tips like this, but see you soon and bye for now.

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