Information Overload – The Email Inbox Trap

We all suffer from it, I am sure (especially if you are into Internet Marketing and sign up to every list, mini-course, newsletter and the likes):

Information Overload – The Killer of Success

Believe it or not, but the big IO is probably one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, Killer of Success for anybody trying to earn a living online.

Are you sitting at your computer day after day, night after night, trying to get through dozens of emails with oh so important information about everything related to making money online, and your inbox is still growing, and GROWING, and GROWING?? The number of “Unread Messages” gets higher every day? You have created folders within folders within subfolders where you start filing all this information to get back to at a later date, when you have more time? All the while not getting done what you should be doing, and that is – making sure you earn some money???

If that’s you, then you, too, have fallen into the “Email Inbox Trap”. You are literally frozen into inaction by all the stuff you are getting bombarded with, so you don’t know any more where to start or what to do.

You can spend hours trying to get through the messages in your inbox whilst missing out on growing (or starting) your business. Been there – done that! The important thing is, once you realize that you are suffering from information overload, you have to tackle the bull by the horn and free yourself to be able to move on with your goals.

One great tip to deal with the over-stuffed inbox I heard the other day from Erik Stafford, The Faster Webmaster

1. Determine what exactly you need to do over the next few weeks to start or grow your business.
2. Check your subscriptions and pick out all the ones which have NOTHING to do with what you have to do over the next few weeks (like, if you need to get a website happening, you do NOT need to read about traffic generation yet, if you get my drift)
3. Unsubscribe from all the subscriptions you have that you DON’T need right now, or that are just general newsletters, promotions etc.
4. Open a new free email account with yahoo, gmail or some other free service.
5. Re-subscribe (if you absolutely have to!) to the lists, newsletters etc. that you still want to receive.

Be really “cruel”, though. Seriously, many of the emails you receive are probably mainly promotional emails, and do you really need them?
If yo do what I said above, a good portion of all these emails clogging up you MAIN inbox should disappear. You will not have lost them though, because you are all collecting them in another email account, so you can go there occasionally (set yourself up with a schedule – maybe once a week on Friday night, for 1 or 2 hours) and check it out. That will prevent you from thinking you are going to miss out on something.

But you will be able to concentrate a lot more on the tasks at hand, instead of wasting away precious productive time 🙂

I found an absolutely amazing video on YouTube on Information Overload concerning your inbox. It is called “INBOX ZERO”, and you should really take the time to watch it. It is nearly an hour long, but it is so worth it.

Tags: http://www.petra-weiss.com/tag/information-overload

Category: Helpful Info