The Village Websmith - Selected Blog Item

Thursday draws its name from the old English for thunder, a translation of a Latin name for Jupiter's Day.

What happened to Terrific Tuesday and Winnin Wednesday this week? Well, the day began, the phone rang and then it ended. That's what it seemed like anyway. The truth of the matter is that I forgot one of the most important lessons that I have ever learned. I didn't concentrate on what is important rather than what is urgent.

Every day has the same number of hours and when you are running a business, you have to get the best possible value out of each one of them. That is something that Gina Gardiner rightly drummed into me. The only way to get value from each hour is to decide what goes into it, rather than letting other people fill it for you.

The massed forces of modern communication can be culprits in taking away control of our time. Phone calls, text messages and emails arrive ceaselessly and can shift our focus if we let them. How often have you gone to your email application to send out a message to find that the inbox is full so rather than the planned sending, you deal with the incoming, only to be distracted half way through by a phone call, then completely forgotten the original aim?

This doesn't have to happen. There is hardly a phone you can buy without some form of answering service attached. Email clients can be set to download incoming mail on demand rather than automatically every five minutes.

Using this technology can put time firmly back in our own control. By switching the phone to silent and collecting messages at convenient times and choosing to manually download emails, our focus stays where we put it until we choose to move it.

If you have a group of customers that you want to hear from regardless of time, then setting up a separate mailbox and making that the only one that is polled regularly is the way forward. Only the people that you want to hear from get to know what that address is and you will know that whenever an email arrives in that box it is important.

Every Webinthebox® site includes up to five email addresses to help you do just this, as well as making your business message stand out, so to find out more, just call us on 0203 239 0350 or click in the header of any page to email us. Tread boldly today!

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