workSMARTER

What if you could find the time to…

• Market your business to new channels?
• Enroll your daughter in ballet?
• Watch your son’s soccer practice?
• Read a good book?
• Update your website?

Do you get sucked into email when you had planned to work on sales, spend time with your kids, or perhaps, sleep? The biggest black hole of the 21st century is email and it’s taking over our lives!

A powerful, quick read called The Hamster Revolution, by Song, Halsey, and Burress can help you get back four to 20 working days per year by helping you reduce your email by 20%.

If you answer yes to any of these questions, the two hours (or less) you will invest reading this book will be well worth it:

• Do you ever play email ping-pong with someone who can’t seem to understand what the heck you are asking for?
• Do you have trouble finding where you saved the latest version of a file?
• Could the email with your son’s little league roster be in the same folder as messages from clients?
• Does your inbox resemble the pile of recipes you’ve saved? (There’s some great stuff in there, but you’ll never make half of it and it takes 30 minutes every time you try to find something.)

This book will benefit anyone suffering from information overload. Here are some of my favorite take-aways:

ABC Emails:
This strategy will help you quickly get the responses you want from your emails. Simply structure your emails in this order

• (A) Action summary (what you want or need from the recipient)
• (B) Background or additional information
• (C) Close

Since most people you email are also inundated with messages, this format helps even the worst “skimmers” to understand your request and provide the desired response quickly. Try it in conversations with your kids, too!

Send Less – Get Less:
The book provides great coaching on effective use of email. By sending less useless or ineffective emails, you will get fewer emails in return. If only this worked with US Mail!

COTA:
This filing system can be used for email, electronic documents, and paper files. Even a working mother of 10 could stay organized with this system!

And the best part is that the book is written as a fable about a hamster named Harold. You can probably read it to your kids and they won’t even know you are multi-tasking!

BIO: Courtney Briggs is a working mother of two and an MBA with over 15 years of advertising, sales, sales training, and management experience. Visit www.courtneybriggswrites.blogspot to learn more about her and her work. Check out www.momstrengths.blogspot.com to learn more about your unique Mom Strengths and how to use them to be a happier, more successful Mom.

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