A Complete Guide to Better Email For Freelancers
When sighing in front of an over-stuffed inbox full of emails that want something from you (work, money, answers, etc.) it’s easy to wish you were running a freelance business in 1988 rather than 2008.
If you conduct a lot of business through the web, a lot of email is one inevitable side-effect. The way freelancers interact with email is unique because of the types of email we get and the actions they require. One-size-fits-all strategies don’t work for us.
This post is an attempted antidote: an email guide for freelancers only. If managing email is something you struggle with, this guide might just contain the approach that’s right for you.
Processing your inbox
The ‘one touch’ ideal — that you should be able to read, respond to and archive each email in one go — is flawed. You can’t always act on emails immediately. For certain types of email, it’s better to take time to think before responding. Things like expressions of interest in your work, correspondence from a disgruntled client and detailed project briefings simply shouldn’t be acted on without thought. The ‘one touch’ inbox might be a productivity ideal, but it’s not the best system for freelancers.
The most important email lesson I’ve learned is to ignore the grim attraction of an empty inbox. Any unresolved exchanges should be kept there, or you’ll forget about them. It’s that simple. I use a ‘Pending’ label to let myself know that an item remains in the inbox because it’s meant to be there (rather than because I’m lazy.)
Archive only when: a) it’s the other person’s turn to respond, but it doesn’t matter much if they don’t, or b) when the conversation is resolved.
Mark as ‘Pending’ and leave in the inbox only when: a) it’s the other person’s turn to respond, and you really need a response, or b) when some action is required on your part, but you’re unable to complete it yet.
Emails you can respond to but don’t want to yet shouldn’t be marked as ‘Pending’. Your aim should be to keep only ‘Pending’ emails in your inbox and process the others as soon as possible.
‘Pending’ emails are kept in the inbox for a reason. Each time you log into your email account, you’ll see those emails and wish that you had a blank inbox staring back at you instead. As a result, you’ll automatically consider whether you can now resolve each ‘Pending’ email. If you can’t yet, you’ll travel through the same thought-process again until eventually you can replace the ‘Pending’ label with another and archive. With this system in place, it’s almost impossible to forget to follow-up important emails.
Cutting down volume
Being able to process emails effectively won’t count for much if your main problem is being swamped by volume alone. The next step is to reduce volume as much as possible. Ideally, you should only be receiving and processing emails which help further your freelancing business. Here are some tips on how to do this:
1. Filter out the junk. The fact that you’ve got a new blog comment, a new friend on Twitter and spam from Amazon isn’t worth the email clutter. If you’re using Gmail, click ‘Create a filter’ next to the search box and add the offending ‘from’ email address. You can set these emails to self-destruct (or… uh… delete) as soon as they arrive, or file them away so they don’t clutter your inbox (but they’ll still there if you need them).
2. Master the “If…” and “Then…” one-two punch. I’ll use a hypothetical to illustrate. You accept two payment options: PayPal and bank deposit. You email a client and ask: “Would you prefer to pay via PayPal or direct deposit?” You get a response three days later. The client wants to pay by direct deposit. You email them your bank account details and get paid another three days later.
Consider the alternative: “Would you prefer to pay via PayPal or direct deposit? If PayPal, you can pay through the invoice I’ve sent you from skellie@notreal.com. If direct deposit, my account details are as follows and you should disregard the PayPal invoice.”
Email #2 hypothetically allows me to get paid in three days rather than six. That’s why I love the “If…” and “Then…” combo. Use it whenever your email only warrants a small number of possible actions and you’ll save days worth of back-and-forth correspondence.
Making labels work
1. Save email purchase receipts and invoices to a special money-related label. If you’re working from a home office, print a hard copy of each email as you archive it using your money label.
2. Create a label for future work opportunities. Save email correspondences from clients who’ve said they might need you again in future to your ‘future work’ label. If job leads dry up, you can email a few of these former clients and ask them if that offer still stands.
3. Archive all email exchanges with clients. You can use these as ammunition if a client tries to mess you around (particularly if they try to renege on rates they’ve previously offered you). The inevitable attempted price revision after you’ve completed a job will happen to all of us once, so it’s best to be prepared!
What’s your current strategy for managing freelance-related email? Most importantly — is it working?
Great Guide, Skellie!
Keep Rocking!
Aloke Pilla
I use OS X’s Mail. I noticed I was spending way too much time – and becoming less productive – because I had set it to check for new mail every minute. I changed that to every 30 minutes a few months ago – and have been getting way more done since. I also cancelled a bunch of the ‘semi-spam’ I had signed up to receive.
I use Gmail in combination with Remember the Milk. I have tons of filters and colored labels, including one for Clients. The Gmail+RTM combo lets you star emails and they automatically become tasks in your task list. Gmail’s spam filters are amazing. Right now I have 1,902 spam emails caught in it. I’ve recently purged tons of worthless subscriptions. Gmail has features that make it easy to port an email into Google Calendar (which also hooks into RTM).
One time-waster I now seem to deal with all the time is when I subscribe to new comments on a blog, but after, oh, I dunno, 30 of ‘em or so, I kinda lose interest and the conversation ain’t what it was when it began. But I keep getting emails. Not everyone uses the plugin for this that lets you manage your subscriptions. I hate that.
I use Basecamp. Any updates – copy changes, contract changes, deadline changes, site edits – get recorded in the basecamp project, which the client has access to. Some clients are better than others about putting their changes directly into basecamp, but even if a change comes through in email, I make sure it ends up in there too. I feel sooo much more organized using this system. I just log into the project, and everything is there – no sorting through emails…
Thanks for the comments guys — it’s been very interesting to hear what systems people are using and how they work.
I like the point of “Archive all email exchanges with clients”. I always keep every single conversation with my clients / Prospect. Btw, I am using Gmail for all my business emails.
I create filters in Thunderbird to flag important incoming mail and these messages automatically get stored in a second special inbox, which I treat as my real inbox. So straight away I know that most of the mail in the first inbox is junk. So that easy to keep empty and I can spend less time assessing the Junk because I know that the bulk of my important messages have already been safely filtered out.
If I can’t reply immediately, I’ll hit reply and save the message as a draft. I also make good use of templates for messages that need to be repeated often and use a Trac system to manage dev tickets and coordinate work with other developers.
I’ve also setup a filter to distinguish spam that’s trying to fake a sender address, which contains any one of my domains.
I really liked that tip about the pending emails. I think that’s what I am going to do now. Thanks for the article
Great ideas. Actually, I use a combination of these. I seemingly have more folders in Outlook than a legal office has in its file room, and (almost) every client correspondence of worth goes into a client’s specific folder (which are subdivided by project, general correspondence, administrivia, etc.). I don’t flag much; just leaving an email in the inbox is flag enough. But to cut the email clutter, when I send a reply and am awaiting word back, I kill the message to which I replied (in Gmail, it automatically builds the thread and eliminates the individual, previous messages). I also use Gmail as the Ultimate Repository. Should I accidentally delete something of worth (and I almost always delete emails from my BlackBerry so as not to clutter it with stuff that’s on my desktop or Gmail), it’s always on the Gmail server. But what’s really cool in reading this piece and associated thread is the validation that comes in kind. In 20 years of freelancing (not ALL with email, of course), I’ve learned a few things – but not everything. Thanks for filling in some of the holes…
Thanks for the if…then tip. I am so lax about getting paid, and my silent business partner/better half is getting onme about quicker turnaroundss on invoices.
sigh …holy typos batman. please excuse.
If you’re working from a home office, print a hard copy of each email as you archive …
So we should trade e-mail inbox clutter for filing cabinet clutter? One of the best ways to truly reduce clutter, both the physical and as it refers to the things we keep track of in general (“your stuff”, in GTD parlance), is to keep everything digital where it’s more easily sorted, easily searched, and more practical to keep for long periods of time.
I use Mozilla Thunderbird, and label emails pretty much as you say. Red for payment related emails, orange for clients, green for providers … =)
Didn’t try labeling future work opportunities but, I’ll give it a shot!
Thanks for the article!
wow that was very nice- thanks for the idea.
LOL do all freelancers write while lying face down on the bed? This seems a little bit uncomfortable, but lately those are the stock images that are being used.
I am another OS X Mail user, and I use filters to automatically apply a color highlight to certain emails. Critical projects get a red highlight, friends are green, and non-critical senders aren’t highlighted at all. At a glance, I can see which emails I want to pay attention to at any given time. If I’m on a deadline, I naturally gravitate to the red project messages. On a weekend, I’ll naturally ignore red messages and pay more attention to the green (social) ones. Unhighlighted messages I’ll get to whenever I feel like.
My mailbox is also nearly spam-free thanks to a two-stage method. My ISP implements SpamAssassin, which works well, and anything that gets through that runs into the Apple Mail junk filter, which can be easily trained to stop the rest. I don’t know if I could deal with email without these spam filters.
Thanks to the two above strategies, it’s easy for me to quickly target just the emails I need to see at any given time. When I look at someone else’s In box, I am always shocked to see a big gray mass of messages of varying, unknown importance mixed with spam, and I don’t know how people deal with that.
I also don’t understand people who print out their emails. Once an email is printed, you can no longer use technology to manage it. It can’t be searched, filtered, sorted, or quickly backed up in volume. A printed email just a dead piece of cellulose requiring physical storage.
Excellent post Skellie! I am a very visual person-out of sight, out of mind. I have been on again off again with Entourage for Mac, Gmail, Thunderbird. I’m currently using all three for different accounts. I really need to streamline!
“grim attraction of an empty inbox” – i agree, absolutely
I use gmail (i have opened it in special tab whole day), unfortunately some e-mails need immediate respone.
Since several years I use PowerMail which works great – it’s mainly a text based email application (though it can display HTML, it does not create any HTML emails at all) – it is great to only read the raw text and it’s really fast to search and combined with SpamSieve it really keeps my inbox to what counts.
Filters put every email right into their own folder : clients have a special email address and get filtered to the top priority location. So have lists their place and family too. PowerMail sports a “recent messages” window and through filters I can control what shows up there. For example, list messages NEVER get displayed there, I don’t even get notified when they come in. On the other hand, client email goes there and sits there visible out in the plain.
If for any reason I can not get complete the response right then and there, these messages either remain in the recent window or, if it can not be completed on the same day, they go into my !important folder which sits right below the inbox and that folder gets scanned at regular intervals.
This system has worked really well in the past.
Thanks for the comments everyone — it’s quite cool to get a behind the scenes look at different people’s system and setups.
@ Kenn Wilson: I suppose it’s a matter of taste, but I think financial documents really must be turned into hard copies and filed. I still don’t have absolute faith that anything I keep digitally is going to be 100% safe, so I like to have that security. I’d also ask whether important documents are really clutter. I don’t think they are. But that’s just my defense of why I recommended that advice: the most important thing is to use a system that suits you, not someone else
.
My system is very similar.
I use gmail. If it’s in my inbox and not starred, I either haven’t read it yet or am somewhat urgently awaiting a reply. If it’s in the inbox and is starred then that means I need to reply and soon. If it’s starred and not in the inbox, I need to reply but there’s no rush. Every morning I review all starred emails. Everything else is archived.
I use labels for service registration notices (“_registrations”), requests for proposals (“_rfp”), receipts (“_receipts”), and for specific projects (usually auto-added with filters).
Thanks for the useful article.
My main e-mail strategies are:
keep inbox as uncluttered as possible.
each client has a specific folder and
each project has it’s own subflder in it.
important Sent mails by me are also stored in these folders.
a seperate “Possible projects/Offers I made” folder is also kept for keeping track.
and finally a seperate folder with info on passwords from sites/forums etc.
This is all good advice, Skellie.
Like many other commenters have said, I also make frequent use of filters to help me sort emails. I check all of my email accounts in Outlook, including both personal and work stuff, so filters are big necessity.
The “one touch” email approach only works on certain things for me, too, usually. I try to apply it to all of my personal emails or to work emails that don’t require a lot of thought, but I almost always want to re-read a work email later after I’ve had time to think about it.
I also never delete any work-related email. It’s always filed into folders under the client name. I keep a different folder for each project I’m working on for that client.
I also agree with the commenter above who prefers to store things digitally rather than in print. If someone does want to go the paper route, I advise keeping a digital copy as well. (And backup regularly!) A flooded home two years ago taught me that lesson.
Please help me to find out how I know my important emails have been read?
I do not wish for the client to feel I am in anyways putting pressure on them specially when it comes to sending contracts and quotations.
This great Skellie,
I am working through getting my inbox to be empty. I like you pending filter as otherwise although archive can find an important email, it can get lost. I just saw how many emails where in my gmail, I need to keep unsubscribing, or use your filter delete method I think
Great tips.
I use gmail with labels.
Every since I started putting labels and filters on everything that comes through Gmail my life has been so much easier. Since I’m somewhat of a neat freak when it comes to my inbox.. I would freak out if it every got over 50 messages.
Liked this…
I find that checking my email on my phone on the dunny can help sort out REALLY important emails and allows you to not have to sit on computer to check emails if you want a day off!
Great Guide…….
I’d love it……
Great going….
Cheers !!!!!!!!!11
Regards
Gopal
In theory the inbox is a great idea for all pending emails, in reality I’ve always struggled to apply this – partly down to the huge amount of different types of emails I get. My latest system involves lots of different folders e.g. personal, business and then mailboxes for every client. Even this I find flawed though as again, some emails just don’t seem to fit a specific type!
Great ideas, dead wrong suggestions. For example:
o OHIO (only handle it once) – in the sense of touching – is flawed: The idea should be only THINK WHAT IT MEANS once (and do this when you first see it). If you can’t take care of it now, defer it for later. But when you do get to it, you’ll be handling it again – thinking about, marking up, responding to, etc.
o “Any unresolved exchanges should be kept there, or you’ll forget about them.” Wrong. This could be called the “distract myself and waste my time” approach. The best practice is to decide the message’s required action, track it OUTSIDE OF THE INBOX, and move it to somewhere else, i.e., separate folders like “Action” and “Pending” (I break the latter into “Action support” and “Delegated.”) If not: You’ll be distracted and stressed every time you read new mail, and you’re re-thinking messages you’ve already thought about once. Waste that freelancers do not need.
Offered in the spirit of constructive provocation
This system works pretty well for me:
First, I only check me email manually about 4-5 times per day. I’d rather deal with a bunch of messages at once than to be interrupted with a “new message” sound every fifteen minutes.
Second, I immediately sort all new emails into one of three folders: “Urgent (Today)”, “Important (This Week)”, and “Whenever”. I try to either archive or reply to everything in the “Urgent” folder by the end of each day. I also try to make sure the “Important” folder is emptied and dealt with by the end of the day on Friday. Stuff in the “Whenever” folder, well, I get to that…whenever (if ever).
This system helps me feel organized and in control, and as a bonus my actual inbox stays empty.
I spend hours a day sorting through useless email, i’ve never thought of using a system like this, and in particluar the ‘Labels’ function. Top idea. Thanks.