Lessons

Lesson Info

Create a Productive Environment

Welcome to organize your email inbox with beth pen my name is jim contention I will be your host for this workshop hello beth welcome to creative life thank you, jim we're so excited tohave beth here today really to help you guys out there learn how to organize your email inbox now beth works for a company she is the mastermind behind benito and that's an organizational company she has helped thousands of people I'm talking individuals, corporations and families get organized if you want to find more about her even goto benito bar dot com that's b and e a t o b a r dot com now but you and I were talking yesterday about my particular email inbox which has like thousands and thousands of e mails and forty seven thousand unopened inhales and those just unopened ones should I be afraid right now now now a lot of my clients are in the same situation and not to say that you're situation isn't special but that's how most people come to me they have lots of e mails and I we walk them through i...

t step by step when we get them back to a good place, right? All right, well let's do it. Thank you. Well, thank you um so as jim and I were talking about clients end up calling me because they feel overwhelmed they have so many emails in their in box you know, they're frustrated because they feel like there's something that they can dio, but they just don't know what that something is, um, it's crazy. Ah, you know, e mails have the they have the capacity to make us upset. They get lost. We're like, where is that email? They can make us feel guilty. You know, jim was saying, I've got so many e mails in my inbox, some of those probably were never responded. Teo, you know, after a week, two weeks, the likelihood of you actually responding to that email is very little so they make us feel really guilty and who wants to I feel guilty on and so it's just really important to realize this this is, you know, why will wantto toe have some better tips and tools when dealing with our email inbox so again, they make us feel overwhelmed. They make us feel frustrated, they make us feel up said, and they make us feel guilty. So this is my little dog, marty on dh. He is with a very old, very old, ah, very old computer. But the biggest reason email builds up is because we use our in boxes that to do list, how many of you guys use your inbox is yeah, I see you nodding ads on so this class is actually designed to get you out of your in box because what's so important is for us to create and get back to our work, which is what we really need to be doing so again, this this class is designed to get you out of your inbox and back to creating on dh we're going to actually take a sampling of an inbox, and I'm going to show you the ways to process we could talk about best practices and things that you could do today when you get home, even if you have forty thousand e mails in your inbox, we're going talk about things that you can do right now and then after showing you so cute after showing you how to slim down your inbox, I'm actually going to show you how to prioritize and handle some of your two duis, so we're gonna talk about lots of good stuff today on dh. What you should know about me is I like keeping it simple. I'm all about the most straightforward, the easiest thing that we can do because I think that when people think about organizing, they think that it needs to be over complicated and really specific and you know, lots of different things in order for it to work well, I think that it should just be the simplest solution because that's, how we're going to keep it up I said that's it we're going to talk about today and essentially can't afford not to take this class I want you to stop wasting hours living in your email inbox and I want you to get out and start just getting back to doing what you love so that being said let's, talk about winning at life, which is what you will be doing once your email inbox is clean and clear ok, so the first thing we want to do is set up the best environment. So over the past year I have started meditating my husband makes one of may he's like, if I walk in and see you chanting, I'm like a you know, you can't do that so he's a little nervous, but what I will say about meditating is you have to have the right environment, you can't have people calling you, you can't you can't, you know have sounds on, so what I do is I have a meditation app and it takes care of that for you. It basically has a little button that you check and no one's allowed to contact you. It turned your phone off, you can't get text messages, and then the sounds that it does have are, you know, a vibrant like a babbling brook, things like that, so it really just sort of gets you into that zen place even even if it's only two to five minutes the benefits are amazing have you guys ever meditated before yeah so you know the benefits you know you're you have more peace you have more control just because it sort of makes you more self aware so when you're in a really challenging situation you're just able toe feel better about everything and it helps with the aging process which is not a bad thing but anyhow I really bring this up because I want you to realize how important it is to have the right environment when we're talking about email decluttering s o if you dio on ly one thing today um and you're going to take away a lot of things but if you only do one thing from today I want you to turn off the thing so we want to turn off the notifications immediately we're bombarded throughout the day with our email inbox how many of you guys have ah computer where you have text messages enabled on the actual computer yeah yeah and it's super distracting I've helped people de clutter virtually and so we're working on the e mails and text messages were coming through I've gotten sort of wrapped up in you know, hundreds of text chains like friends are all in a group and we're just texting back and forth and while that is a really fun it can be really overwhelming and you feel just sort of taken hostage by it all. Um and in addition to but all of the, you know, visual stuff there the sound so we have the ringing we have the dinging we have, if just every possible noise that is just so distracting. So it's important to turn off the visual stuff as well as the sounds. So let's, actually, I'm gonna walk you guys through some stuff. Um, what email client do you guys use? Just out of curiosity, I have a couple mostly one it's, a web mail or gmail with mailer gmail okay, so we primarily are going to be talking about gmail stuff in here today, but I do have a little bit of apple male stuff because I feel like it's divided as faras like users would see their gmail or apple male another some outlook folks a well, hotmail, I mean, I don't want to talk about that, but I'm not that that's bad, but my mom still has a well and I've tried to convert her to gmail, but not much luck there, so we could bring it. Tio two my gmail inbox will actually going to show you guys how to do this um, so here we are, so I actually use apple mail, so you're actually not looking at my current well, it is my gmail account cause I do have one, but I don't process anything here, eh? So what we're going to do first is I'm going to show you how to turn off chat notifications, how to turn off gmail notification, so what we're going to do was just we're going to go to this settings wheel here, and we're just going to go down to settings and there's a lot of different tabs here. So what we're looking for it's actually under the general tab, and we're just going to scroll down and you can see I already have my mail notifications is turned off so there's a couple things you khun dio, we can turn it off, which is really good, or you can actually turn just to have important mail notifications on. So unless you signify someone is an important sender, you're not going to get notified. So it's essentially like having notifications turned off, but I'm going to show you how to set this up. So let's say we want important notifications on because we're working on a project and we want to make sure that we're going to get notified from that particular center, so we're just going to save changes, and then we're going to create a filter, so do you guys really know what filters aren't gmail so a filter they call it a filter, which to me is a little confusing because I feel like a filter should be called a rule because that's essentially what it is it says, you're telling the email program what to do when a certain female comes in again, they're calling it a filter, so let's say, and this is not the case, but let's say spam drain is a client that we want to get notified um, even though we have our notifications turned off, so we're just going to click on this and then say more, and we're going to just go down to filter messages like these, so what it does is it fills in who it's from so say that's, our important client, we need to know if the email us we're going to create a filter I don't need to fill in a this other stuff, and I just need to know who it's coming from so we can tell it to do a bunch of different things, but remember, we want to just market is important so that it uses that filter through the notifications, okay? So next, after we are doing all this good stuff, we're going to tell it what to dio so again we want to market is important, so um let's see here it is always market is important um and then as you can see, I already have four e mails from spam drain so I can go ahead and apply that filter to four matching messages so I would just say create filter and the rule is created I can go in there and edited I can say you know what? I don't want this rule anymore it's really easy and I'm just going to actually go ahead and turn that off just cause I don't want to get any e mails while we're in here but so mail notifications off so I'm gonna go and do that? Yes when I make these settings on my desktop computer will that reflect on my mobile device that might be connected that's a really good question um they're using the gmail atthe or the gmail or just your mail on your iphone? I'm using gmail at or the gmail I guess because it's an android phone so I think so I think they talk very well together and that works I think if you're just using your mail on an iphone, I don't think that it would translate a skouras the notifications could I think the phone has separate notification that does wondering about the filters that's a good question I want to say that with gmail ap it probably does and then with rules just plain old rules, not notifications they do translate, okay if you're using the mail app and not just the gmail, ok, some next I want to show you. So remember how we talked about the chat or text messages on your desktop? So I want to just quickly show you how to turn those off because those khun b very, very distracting, so you're just going to go down to system preferences click on that guy and you can see it already has this like red glaring bubble. This has notifications, so we're just going to click on that and why we are going to go down to messages right here, and I already have it turned off, but you can see that if I had alerts, talk turned on, I'd get that the banner message that comes across the screen, which is super distracting, I'm just going to go ahead and say none, I don't have any of these others checked, so we're just on checking these this check box doesn't affect whether or not it's basically as long as you have none checked, you're not going to get the text message notifications, banner sounds that will all be turned off. Um, so we're just gonna click out of there and then I also just talking about the cell phone let's, bring it to my cell phone really quick and I will quickly show you how to turn that guy off tipping my code and actually, because of this class, I already have it turned off, but I will show you where to go. Um ok, so we go into settings and instead of going into notifications, which is where you can manually turn on and off certain applications, we're just going to go to do not disturb and you know that it's on do not disturb because of can you get see that little moon? So that means that it's on and you could manually said, ok, I don't want to be disturbed from eight o'clock at night till you know, ten o'clock in the morning and I can show you it pulls up that and so you couldn't you can click in that time, but if I just have it quickly on, do not disturb, then I am not going tio get notified of text messages, phone calls, things like that, so I'm just going to turn it back on so we don't get interrupted today. Does anybody have any questions about notifications? Yes, no indications that there was going to give a big thank you because my husband is it doesn't bother me, but it drives him insane he's like, why is your phone off those noise and we're watching movies on the computer, the things just pop just right and I was like I don't know how to turn it off so this is a huge this is wearing the price of admission her didn't I tell you if you do one thing, this is the thing I'm great. Okay, so let's, take it back to power point and let's continue. Um, so we talked about all of these guys so let's say you're not convinced and there might be some skeptics still in the room. You might be saying yourself, beth, I do not know how I'm going to survive. I just I can't I can't I can't do that let's just talk about some fax when it comes to distractions. Well, first of all, um ten to fifteen minutes it actually you get interrupted by an email notification it takes ten to fifteen minutes to get back to the task you were actually doing and actually the other day just cause I'm you know I absorbed this information. I love it. I heard twenty three minutes and fifteen seconds, which is a crazy amount of time to lose because of an email interruption. We lose one hour each day, teo checking emails and then we check emails thirty six times how many like in what time do you think we checked thirty six? What do you think it's like all day, we check our email thirty six times half a day what do you guys think? One hour we check our email thirty six times of one hour isn't that crazy? But I promise it happens it really really does so what's fascinating is it's also not good for our brain when we try to switch back and forth between tasks our brain produces more chemicals which just turn it into overdrive and it allows us to not even make good decisions and in the part of our brain ah which we really need to utilize into focus get swayed super quickly by interruption so we have to protect it all costs so even if you think it's not a problem it really really is and then the other thing is you know you get home you've you've worked all day you feel really tired but it's not from getting any real work done it's actually from toddling back and forth because it burns up brain power so we're just exhausted but it's not from getting a lot of stuff done so those are the cold hard facts um and I want to talk about, um a project it's called board and brilliant um so we probably haven't been bored since we got our first iphone right? We always have something to dio their games there's instagram there's checking email and there's you know, it's great you're connected to people you can check in, you confined friends we feel um, you know, we feel more organized because we have our phones, but there's a really big flip side to that, um, and what board and brilliant did, which I'm going to talk about it's a challenge to disconnect from your phone on dso this radio station, a public radio station in new york, decided to do a challenge, and they called it fordham brilliant on what they did was they had meant they had members who sign up, and they had them go through this entire challenge over a couple weeks. The first part of it was to download an app called moment, which clocks the amount of time you spend on your phone. Um, I would tell you guys what mine number is but it's really embarrassing because you don't really you're not aware of how much time you really are tethered to your phone, and so this challenge was all about making people more aware of how often we check in we check our phone, and then they also wanted to bring to light, um, studies which show that when we are never bored, which is when we have our phone honest all the time, we sacrifice creativity, which I think is really unsettling, they find that we actually have our most creative thoughts after our brain has been idle. After we do really boring tasks they actually had people read the phone book and people got their most novel ideas after reading the phone book um so do you guys want to hear what some of the challenges they had people dio yeah okay, so well, the first thing was we talked about the moment app, which you guys can still download even though the challenge is done which had they just finished you guys can still download download moment, but the first challenge was keep your phone in your pocket now they didn't even they don't even mean keep it in your pocket the whole day but if you guys have ever been out people are on their phone I almost walked into a guy yesterday because he was just, you know, on his phone ah, so they just want you to sort of be aware when you have your phone out I don't know if you guys do this, but when I'm working at my desk I just had my phone like right here I'll even use the computer aligned it up tricking I'm here, I'm checking so they just say put your phone in your pocket when you're working when you're walking down the street, the second challenge was, uh no pictures, so no matter how amazing that since it is don't take a picture you're out to dinner with friends don't take a picture they'll be pretty hard right it's just part of like how we are these days so no pictures for one whole day, so try that the third challenge was delete the app so I don't know if you guys played candy crush or dots or any of those super addicting games I for some reason missed the boat on all of those I'm not a super like game player on my phone, but I am an instagram check, so for me it would be the lead against a gram, which it would be hard to dio, but I could do it for a day I think, um the fourth one, which is really fun it was, uh pretend like you're on a folk ation. So what that means is any email that comes in you have ah, an email message that's an automatic reply saying ham out of town or I'm taking, you know, a vocation for the day, so I'm not going to get back tio until tomorrow so just something really simple. So you consort of not feel like you've got email people back for a day and then the fifth one was go some republic just notice things that you wouldn't normally notice because you're tied to your phone and then the last one, which was really fun ah wass actually so you would come home, boyle water. So you actually watch water boil on dh, you could make to your coffee, or what have you and then take all of the contents? I don't my purse with me, but you take all the contents of your purse or your wallet, and you would actually create your dream home using money, your paper coins, and you would upload that picture to flicker. Hey was so cool to see what people had created, and I don't know, it's. Just fun to see creativity versus, you know, being on your phone and all that good stuff. So anyhow, I would highly advise you guys to check it out. All the podcast. They're still up there on all of the projects are still there for you guys to take full advantage of.