2 lessons I learned from hiring an Executive Assistant & hitting Inbox Zero
Hiring an Executive Assistant & hitting Inbox Zero… changed my life.
The level of peace I felt after I did this blew my mind.
I’ll get to that in a second, but first you gotta hear where I was at…
I’ve hired VA’s before & had full-time team members for years, but last year was the first time I hired someone to support JUST me. An Executive Assistant.
… and honestly, the real support I was looking for was around my inbox.
(I know I’m not alone in being emotionally triggered by Gmail…)
(I.e., putting off checking it because I was afraid what I’d find & then feeling really stressed thinking about what I was missing by not checking it)... if you know, you know.
When you work with clients the inbox can be a mix of welcome praise, urgent messages, critiques, projects, project management…
It’s also the place you get spammed, you get inquiries for new work, and all sorts of education & entertainment from the newsletters you’re subscribed to.
And surely enough your inbox becomes a holding place for long term projects & emails you’re “really meaning to respond to” but have been sitting there for months.
(But as long as it’s sitting there you swear you’ll respond eventually)
Anyways… I get my Executive Assistant & within a few days of her doing 2x daily passes at my inbox I’m at Inbox Zero.
So… what is Inbox Zero, anyway?
If you don’t know what Inbox Zero is, it’s essentially the productivity Holy Grail of no new emails in your inbox because they’ve been responded to or put into an appropriate folder… every day.
I didn’t think it’d be a big deal, but holy fuck it was.
I had told myself that I “just needed to get over my emotional response to my email inbox.”
I had also told myself that “no one could do it for me” because a lot of the emails that run through my inbox require specialized knowledge, like the specifics of Facebook ads campaigns.
But the truth was, I just needed to love myself where I was at & outsource things that were unnecessarily draining me.
When I did that, it changed everything.
Within DAYS I was waking up feeling relaxed & FREE because I knew someone else was paying attention to if anything urgent was coming in.
2 lessons I learned from hiring an Executive Assistant & hitting Inbox Zero
1. Outsourcing things that genuinely drain you can have a MASSIVE impact on the experience you have in your business.
In some cases, you CAN just change your Circumstances & have a genuinely different/better experience of your reality
It’s not always about healing trauma & upgrading your mindset.
2. DON’T USE YOUR INBOX LIKE A TO DO LIST.
If you’re like me, you already fucking knew this. And yet… I was still doing it.
Everyday respond to what’s urgent/important & then move the rest into folders or a project management system like Asana to deal with at another time.
As always - your business, your rules.
You don’t need an Executive Assistant to get to Inbox Zero & you do not need to hit Inbox Zero to have a delightful experience with your inbox.
But if you’re shaming yourself that “you should be able to do this on your own,” this is your permission slip to just get the support you need, even if it’s way more support than your peers/spouse/family/friends/etc. are getting 😘
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