Stop Wasting Your Time on Email
Ever feel like your email inbox is managing you, instead of the other way around? We often speak with leaders who share this sentiment, to which we reply, “an executive assistant can do that for you!” From our experience in working with clients in various industries, sectors, and roles, outsourcing their email inbox to an executive assistant, even just partially, adds valuable hours back into their day so they can spend more time focusing on their most important work. Here are some practical ways that you can delegate this work to an EA:
Decide What Emails You Don’t Need to See At All
Chances are, you have emails that are clogging up your inbox, time, and brainspace that you don’t need to see at all. Examples include automatic meeting confirmations, e-newsletters from trade organizations, and mass emails from travel companies, retailers, and the like. It might only take a few seconds for you to open that email, review quickly and then delete, but all of those precious seconds add up over time. An executive assistant can archive (or create rules to automatically archive) these emails for you, so you won’t have to spend your time clearing these out of your inbox.
There are also emails that you may not need to see right away, if ever at all, but you want to have in case you need to reference them later (think: the financial report from a past board retreat or a meeting recap from a 1:1 you attended yesterday). Your assistant can label and file these emails so you can easily pull them up later, or create filters and rules so these emails skip your inbox and automatically land in labeled folders. You can grab them when you want them, but they won’t clog up your primary inbox so you can focus on items that are truly actionable in the moment.
Determine Which Responses Can Be Handled Without You
Speaking of actionable emails, a key benefit of having an executive assistant is having someone tee-up email response drafts for you. Imagine logging into your inbox, and a draft response to each actionable email is written already for you to simply review and send.When an executive is delegating email management to their assistant, we recommend they determine which emails the assistant can handle on their behalf without any input from them. If the EA has full visibility into the executive’s calendar and travel schedule, they can handle confirming travel plans and meeting confirmations on their behalf, rolling up all of the valuable information once finalized. Likewise, if they have full access to their digital files, they can send meeting agendas, reports, and other documents on their behalf as well.
There are likely email responses that you might want a little bit of control over but can easily be started on your behalf. Enter the “tee up.” This is one of our favorite ways that an executive assistant can save a leader valuable time. If you often get the same types of emails, identify some typical emails that you send in response. Share this information with your EA so they can draft these responses for you moving forward; then, all you have to do is review, add some personalization as needed, and send. How many minutes could this save you per day? Per week?
Have Your Assistant “Roll Up” Emails to You for Action
Imagine this: you’re able to glean all of the important information from a slew of emails just by reviewing one succinct “digest” each day. Sounds like a dream, right? Enter your executive assistant and that dream becomes your reality! Creating an email digest is one of the most effective ways that our team of virtual executive assistants helps the leaders we serve to be efficient with their time. By reviewing their inbox and pulling out the key information, links, and action items, they are able to save the executive valuable time each day.
One of the ways our team does this is by utilizing the Digest tool from our partners at Base. Base offers various templates that can be customized based on the type of work an executive assistant does for the executive and by using these templates, they can pull in meeting notes, files, attachments, events, and more within minutes.
Leah Pallant, EA to our CEO, shares, "Having a Digest template saves me formatting time every time I start a new one, and I cannot say enough about how AMAZING it is to pull calendar events directly into the body of the email...Let me gush about the minutes and hours saved because hyperlinks and attachments within calendar holds still work when you pull them to your digest! Amazing!"
In addition to a regular “digest” practice, an executive assistant can label emails for you so you can quickly fly through those that require some sort of action and start to see your inbox achieve that coveted “inbox zero.” As your EA learns about you, your work, and your inbox, they'll be able to quickly label emails for you based on the type of action that's needed. Here are some examples of email labels that our team has created and how they’ve been used to help clear the exec’s inbox:
Review and Archive: These emails are typically quick so you can fly through them and start feeling accomplished!
Response Needed: Work through those quick response emails and get them off of your plate.
Action Needed: You've been building momentum and now you are ready to tackle the action item emails.
At 33Vincent, we pride ourselves on helping the leaders we serve be most efficient with their time by focusing on their most important work. If you’re ready to delegate the management of your email to free up hours in your week, let’s talk about how a 33Vincent EA can support you!
33Vincent has many other resources to help you maximize your time and communication with your executive assistant.
