How often are you overwhelmed by the amount of email you find on any given day? Do you read all of it? If you do, how much time are you spending on that? Be honest. Even an hour a day can add up to a massive amount of lost income over the course of a year. How much is your email habit costing you?

As entrepreneurs, our business time is especially important. Every hour spent on non-revenue generating tasks is a financial burden. Imagine how many potential clients you could meet, how many clients you could be working with, how much list-building you could do or how many new products/ services you could be creating. If you were to assign a dollar amount for all of these income-producing activities, the numbers could be staggering. Stop leaving all this money on the table and clean out that email!

Tip #1 – Turn off the email notifications so that you do not see a message or hear an audible cue that a message has come in. This is a huge distraction and an invitation to “just check this one message quickly”.

Tip #2 - Do not start your day off with email. You will get sucked into lower priority items for the day. Schedule in the times that you will read or respond to email and stick with that schedule! When the time is up for email, shut it down. Make sure your clients know that you will respond to email within a particular time frame.

Tip #3 - Delegate your email to a VA. Start slowly. At first, both of you can read the emails and your VA can be copied on your responses to get to know your style. Once your VA is responding to your emails, ensure that you are copied until you are comfortable with their responses. If you are not in a position to get a VA yet, then set a timer for how much time you will spend reading and responding to email and stick to that time! Set an alarm, and when the buzzer goes off, the email is shut down.

Tip #4 - Stop subscribing to every newsletter you encounter! While it is a great way to get information and inspiration, this can be one of the biggest time-wasters out there. I love the newsletters that I am subscribed to. They offer a lot of information and useful tips. But, I am subscribed to a select few. Not sure how to weed them out? If there is a newsletter that you simply delete because you do not have the time to read it, or you simply scan over it to see if there is anything useful, unsubscribe! You can always subscribe again if that particular information becomes more relevant to you.

Tip #5 – Get a handle on the free ebooks or reports! If you do not read them within 2 business days, you do not need them. How many ebooks or reports do you have saved in your email, or lost because you cannot find them? These are often included in subscriptions in exchange for your name and email address, but if they are not enticing enough for you to read right away, you likely don’t need them. Read through the content and if you find a lot of useful information, then by all means, save it for reference. Otherwise, save the space on your laptop or PC.

Tip #6 – Be selective with your notifications. Getting an email every time you get a new Twitter follower or a post is added on Facebook or you have an invitation to another event on LinkedIn is a waste of your time. When you have your scheduled social media time for the day, you will see it all then.

Bonus Tip – Avoid getting sucked into “get rich quick” promotional emails. Reading those sales letters about all the millions you are going to make when you purchase this program or that product can conjure up happy images of jet-setting around the world, but it is not reality. If it were really that easy, wouldn’t we all be sailing around the world right now?

Extra Bonus Tip – Keep on top of your inbox by deleting messages as you finish reading them and only saving those that you WILL need later. Every month, go through your inbox and delete everything that has been sitting there unread.

Spending too much time on your email is like having a cold. Until you purge all the excess, it is going to hang around and make you miserable. Start slowly if you need to, but get your control back over your inbox!

Author's Bio: 

Lisa Fraser is a Marketing & Money Mindset Business Coach and the founder of Lisa J Fraser Business Coaching - Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling on Your Coaching or Small Business Income.

Lisa specializes in helping Coaches and Women-preneurs who are ready to stop struggling to get their message seen and heard so they can attract ideal clients and generate a great income with their business. By leveraging their time and streamlining their offers, they are able to happily serve more clients, work fewer hours in their business and avoid burnout. Lisa's clients discover their perfect niche, create a Signature Brand, package up their offers, generate their 1 year marketing calendar, create a "million dollar mindset" and finally charge what they're worth...and get it!

With her positive energy and unwavering commitment to the success of her clients, Lisa helps her clients achieve consistent, lucrative results.

Lisa Fraser is a Certified Coach Practitioner; Money, Certified Marketing and Soul Coach; and Certified Niche Breakthrough Specialist.