Here is a completely and utterly obvious statement: Insurance agencies get too many emails.
No kidding, right?
Here is something most overlook: It is killing your productivity. I’m sorry to tell you that it is your fault. Let me explain….
You’re sitting at your desk, working on an account……DING! “You have mail!” Or it’s a text or a phone call, or someone pops in to ask you something. Your attention is ripped away from something important to you to something important to someone else.
Once you return to what you were doing before, 10, 20, or 30 minutes have passed, and you have had to change your focus several times.
Why do you let that happen?
Letting your email inbox or the countless other things that require your attention distract you in this way kills productivity because you have to move in and out of focus on multiple things without completing a task from start to finish. That eats up time and causes anxiety.
I like the way Winston Churchill addresses this:
“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”
Think about it, all day long, every day you have these things competing for your time:
- Office phone
- Cell phone
- Text
- Office text
- Fax (for a few of us still)
- Instant messenger
- Slack
- Teams
- Fellow employees
- Customers
- Prospects
- Insurance companies
- Vendors
- Calendar
- AMS reminders
- AMS tasks
All these things represent people. All of these people share a common trait: they believe their time is more important than yours and have no hesitation in disrupting your workflow for their priorities.
As Nancy Regan said in the 80s, “Just say no!”
Take back your productivity and your workflow by saying “no.”
Look, these people interrupting you are not doing so to be rude; you allow yourself to be interrupted, so they do it.
Here are a few tips to help manage this:
- Turn off ALL notifications. Anything that dings or pops up on your screen.
- Set a time (or times) each day that you check: email, texts, voicemails, etc. This may need to be different blocks of time.
- Time block when you make and receive calls
- Set a block of time for you to do focused work. Call it quiet time, focus time, me time, whatever. Just set the time aside. If you are the owner, let people know about this time. If you are an employee, suggest this as something your office does.
- Do the most important work during your “focus time”
- Use Outlook Rules to filter out the non-urgent emails
To sum it up. Take back your productivity by turning off notifications and managing distractions.