As your entrepreneurial life takes off, you'll find your
business slowly getting cluttered with repetitive,
frustrating (and often time-wasting) tasks. It's all too
easy to lose hours a week — or hours a DAY —
focusing on things that aren't productive, instead of
pouring your energy into profit-producing activities.
Which means, it's critical you recognize the "time
vampires", as Dan Kennedy calls them, and put an end to
them once and for all. Kill them as soon as they start
cluttering your day.
That's why I'm a *huge* fan of outsourcing these tasks so
you can have more fun (and time) in your life. But
outsourcing doesn't always have to be to another person -
it can mean handing something off to software or 3rd-party
systems that handle the heavy lifting.
So with "Organize Your Home Office Day" recently being
celebrated, I thought it would be the perfect time to share
three of my favorite kick-butt, time-saving tools with you
in this three-part series. In part #1, I hit on the ins
and outs of Google's awesome free Calendar service. Now on
to part #2...
CLUTTER REDUCER #2: Spam Arrest (spamarrest.com)
In today's world, the biggest time waster is EASILY email.
Much has been written on regaining control of your inbox,
controlling our email addictions and more, so I'm not going
to spend time covering a topic that's been thoroughly
covered. Instead, I'm going to focus on the biggest email
clutter culprit (and how to kill it).
Do the math and you'll see you're losing days, if not
weeks, each year deleting spam. 10 minutes a day x 5 days a
week x 50 work weeks a year = almost 42 hours spent
deleting spam each year. That's at least a FULL work week
totally lost to email you never want to see in the first
place! And if your business is bigger...you can easily tack
on another week or two of wasted time.
So since this article series is about reducing clutter -
and nothing clutters up your computer time like spam - I
highly recommend you check out Spam Arrest. For the last 3+
years, this inexpensive, but powerful, service has been
protecting me from hundreds of thousands of spam messages.
In fact, in the last week alone it's blocked 7,493+ pieces
of spam sent to my personal inbox (our company email
addresses get 4-5x that amount). Yikes!
Essentially it works on a challenge/response system.
Someone emails you, and the service emails them back asking
for verification they are a real person. It happens ONE
time and BAM...the person now makes it to your
inbox...while all the other spam emails never see the light
of day.
Of course you have full control over everything, so you can
block emails, import your contacts ahead of time and do
much more. Plus if you take an extra hour or two to set it
up, your contacts don't even need to know you're using it.
Just like Google Calendar, Spam Arrest can pull everything
into one centralized location. It checks multiple email
accounts for me...dropping them all into my master inbox.
That way I'm not wasting more time trying to manage
multiple inboxes. The tiny amount of time it takes to get
all the legit emails on your "whitelist" is WELL worth the
weeks of your life that will be saved. This service is
highly recommended for everyone who relies uses in email in
their business or personal lives!
And stay tuned for the final clutter reducer which will
free you from the time trap of voicemail once and for all!
----------------------------------------------------
Chris Zavadowski, 2007-2008's Coach of the Year, has gained
top recognition online and offline for his unique ways of
growing businesses with the Internet. For more of Chris'
breakthrough online marketing resources, and to find out
about Clutter Reducing Tools #1 and #3, visit his totally
free blog at: http://www.mlmblog.com/unclutteryourlife.html
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