Email Conflicts when Working from Home

If you are working from home running a small business, whether online or offline, a franchise or another form of business, keeping in touch with customers and suppliers can seem like an almost impossible juggling act. Not only are you expected to keep all the balls in the air, as well as keeping everyone happy, but also you are constantly being distracted the entire time, with extra balls being thrown at you, and an ever-increasing demand for you to juggle faster, better, harder.

Perhaps the worst aspect of all is the boss - you! Often those working for themselves within a small home business are the meanest bosses, constantly putting extra pressure on themselves, and always striving for the perfection which is almost never likely to happen.

Although the internet has enabled working from home to be more viable in respect of communication techniques, this technology can sometimes be our worst enemy. Email, for example, is easy to use and using it you can easily and rapidly remain in touch with the important persons in your business. However, there is a downside to this useful tool!

Consider the situation: you have just managed to find some peace and quiet at home, and have settled at your computer to get on with some work. You have identified the most pressing matters and readied yourself. Perhaps you even manage to make a start. Then a little bell sounds, and a friendly popup window slides into view informing you that you have an email. You notice the name - it's one of your clients. Unable to leave it until later, you quickly decide to check to see what it is they want.

Having read the email, and of course replied, since you want to give a good impression, and a prompt response will show them you're on the ball, you then check out some of their previous messages, and make some notes on the work needed. Time for a coffee after sorting that little matter out. Several minutes later, you're about to get started on that pressing work you'd intended to do, and then another email slides into view. This time it's spam, so you decide to tighten up your spam filters to make sure you're not disturbed that way again. 15 minutes later, you have some glorious filters set up, but still no work done on getting new business.

This situation can quite easily continue for a very long stretch of time, and if you're running your own small business then the chances are that this scenario sounds painfully familiar. The real problem is that the work becomes fragmented, and delayed, taking much more of your time than it should have done. Not only that, but in all likelihood the emails which arrived were not urgent, and could easily have waited an hour or two, or even until the afternoon.

Many people find that they do their best work in the morning, and for those running their own business, this means that your most creative work, the most profitable work and the most successful achievements may well take place first thing in the day.  However, this is also when most of the emails are sent, and for this reason, your best working time swiftly becomes your worst working time.

What this is leading to is that in order to make sure that your business communications are not entirely floundered, there is a very simple solution. Don't have your email on automatic download or notification. It may be that you don't even need your email program open at all, in which case, avoid opening it at all costs! Set some time aside later in the day - perhaps after you've achieved the more urgent tasks first thing, or even until after lunch time. It's unlikely there'll be anything so urgent that it can't wait a while, and in the meantime you are likely to be much less distracted, and able to achieve much more effective use of your working time.

In terms of your business email system, it may well be helpful to set up a number of filters, not just for spam, but also for clients, job tasks or subjects. By having individual clients' emails automatically diverted to specific folders, you can be more efficient in dealing with customers, able to see all of the communications from them in one go, rather than scanning through your inbox in chronological order, skipping from one job to the next, from one subject to the next, which will then entail you going through the whole lot again to understand it properly.

Running a small business needn't be an impossible juggling act, as long as you don't make the job any harder for yourself than it already is. Give yourself the chance to run your business smoothly and without unnecessary interruptions - make your email start working for you, rather than adding to your problems.

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