To achieve the peace of mind you want from your e-mails, you have to delegate, but that could be a problem of its own, so sharing your e-mail so that the virtual assistant can check, reply, and perform the tasks required, that would be a bonus to your time.
Most of the tasks are delegated by e-mail. The common way to do this is to send emails to your virtual assistant, and that's also the problem.
E-mail forwarding works until numbers of tasks is low and you delegate only to one person. As numbers of emails and numbers of assistants rise, things will start to go wrong rapidly.
To get started on bringing some order to your inbox disorganization, we need to set you up properly, so that you can instantly become more effective as a business person, when it comes to handling email yourself. And that means Gmail.
Setting up your e-mail so that your Virtual Assistant can manage it for you
To achieve the freedom of e-mails you seek, you will have to do this.
Here you have a couple of options:
1) Share your username and password. You can use a password protection service like lastpass.com if you want to keep your actual password secret, or
2) Once your Gmail is set up, search for the section "Grant access to your account" under your account settings. This allows your VA to read your emails and respond in your behalf.
As explained earlier, letting go of our email is probably one of the toughest jobs that business people struggle with. I can understand why, I mean, the thought of someone other than yourself reading messages that are being sent directly to YOU, is a little uneasy, at first.
The point is if you want to keep a certain amount of emails from certain people, you can. Simply give them a secret, non-published email address. You will have to learn to control yourself here - no more than five people can have access to this email address at once. Okay!?
The rest – you’re gonna let go of. You’re gonna hand this over to a VA to manage for you, going forward.
As soon as your VA has access to your inbox, you will have to spend a little time working through your "particular" style when it comes to your inbox. So when you open a new message, you are only allowed to do one of the following:
Reply
Delete
Archive
Once you have taken these steps in place, I assure you that the time you spend on your email will be significantly reduced.
