When you work online, you will find that the things that you need the most to maintain important business connections are also the things that will derail you from the path of productivity. Social media is well known to be filled with distractions. It is not the only place you’ll likely get into trouble though. There’s another online tool that can be just as distracting and disruptive to your productivity as it is a necessity. That tool is your inbox.

How Your Inbox Stops You from Getting Things Done

Your inbox can hinder your ability to get things done in two ways. The first are notifications. Even if you don’t have your email open on your desktop, you likely have alerts for new email set up on your smartphone. So if that alert goes off, your mind will always wander into thinking about what new email you just received. Sometimes that quick distraction is all it takes to get your focus off the task at hand.

Another way your inbox can stop you from getting things done is by being overloaded. I don’t know about you, but I work a lot more efficiently if I feel like I have a manageable to-do list. A flooded inbox with tons of emails waiting for responses does not feel manageable, and the more overloaded it gets, the less I want to deal with anything in it.

Why an Empty Inbox is a Happy Inbox

So why would you want to get your inbox down to zero? I like to look at an empty inbox at the end of the day as a day where everything that needed to get done was finished. Think of each email in your inbox as a task that needs to be completed. Email tasks generally boil down to the following four things:

1. Someone needs you to complete something for them.
2. Someone needs you to make a decision.
3. Something needs to be filtered.
4. Something needs to be deleted.

When you want to empty your inbox, you need to focus on doing one of the above four things. Now let’s look at how to do an initial cleanup of an overloaded inbox!

Cleaning Up Your Inbox

When I first decided that I wanted to get my inbox down to zero emails, I had to tackle about 300+ emails, some which dated several months back. But at that point, enough was enough. So I dedicated the weekend to start going through my emails, one by one, to see whether I could immediately do one of the four above things for each email.

At the end of the weekend, I had gotten things down to five emails in my inbox, all of which required me to finish a major project I was still working on. Everything else was moved out of the inbox by doing the following:

• If the email was from someone who needed something done for them (most of the time it was something simple like send a piece of example code, fill out an interview questionnaire, or review a product), I either did it immediately or politely declined. The judgment call on that was if it took more than 5 minutes to complete, it was declined. If it took less, I just made myself do it.
• If the email was from someone who needed me to decide on something (whether I would attend an event, sponsor a contest, or review a guest post) I just made a fast decision and replied with my response of yes, I’ll be attending, yes I will sponsor, or no, that post doesn’t meet my guidelines.
• If the email was from a newsletter or mailing list I had subscribed to, I created a new filter for it to go into a folder automatically when the next installment arrived or, if I didn’t plan to read it again, I unsubscribed.
• If the email was something that I wasn’t interested in responding to, or regular enough to require a filter, I deleted it.

Sometimes, the toughest part of emptying out your inbox is finally saying no to something. I know many of my emails were hanging out in my inbox simply because they required me to say no to someone’s product review, guest post, event invitation, or some other request. Once you’ve started to say no to some things, it will make it easier to do in the future and leave your inbox open to receive more good requests that you will want to say yes to.

Keeping Your Inbox Clean

There are three great habits you need to adapt to if you want to keep your newly emptied inbox at zero.

Before I get into these, it’s important to think about how you use email. Some people use emails as a reminder that they need to be on a particular network or website to do something. By turning off notifications, you might miss out on those reminders to do something whereas you will remember them by filtering.

If you know you’ll be in HootSuite all day every day, then there’s no need to get an email notification every time you get a direct message. But if you know you only check your LinkedIn group when they send you the digest, then you might want to keep that email notification on but filter them from your inbox.

Now let’s move onto those good, inbox-cleaning habits.

1. Turn off unnecessary notifications.

Whenever you sign up for a new social network, forum, or other website, chances are you are going to be opt-in automatically to notification emails from that website. Be sure that when you sign up to a new website, you find your email notification settings and turn off the ones you do not need. Otherwise, you’ll have new emails for friend requests, new messages, offers, products, and a whole slew of other things you may not need bombarding your inbox.

Some popular networks’ email notification settings pages include the following. You’ll need to be logged in for these to work.

• Twitter – http://twitter.com/settings/notifications
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=notifications Also look for individual group notification settings under the Notifications dropdown.
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/settings/ Email Preferences. Be sure to look at the frequency of group digest emails if you belong to a lot of groups.
• Google+ – https://plus.google.com/u/0/settings/plus
• YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/account_notifications

Another area where you might get a lot of emails is from blog commenting. For blogs using third-party commenting systems, you can change your notification settings globally by going to the following.

• Disqus – http://disqus.com/dashboard/ > dropdown under your username in the top right > Edit Profile > Notifications.
• Livefyre – http://www.livefyre.com/profile/edit/notifications/
• Posterous – http://posterous.com/#account/notifications/edit

For commenting on other blogs using the base comment system, look for checkboxes before the submit button asking if you want to subscribe to comments. Sometimes these are automatically checked, especially if you have subscribed to comments from a previous post.

2. Filter anything you will not need to respond to immediately.

This is huge when it comes to keeping your inbox at a neat, manageable level. If it is an email you will not need to take an immediate action on, be sure to filter it. This includes:

• Any notifications from social networks, forums, or other websites you have signed up for which you want to receive.
• Comment reply notifications from blogs.
• Newsletters or mailing lists.
• Casual acquaintances (who 90% of the time only send you FW: emails).

Really, you can filter almost everyone and just keep an eye on the folders you filter them to, that way your inbox is only prioritizing new people that you might have to respond to the fastest. Some general filters that work well include the following.

• Create blog commenting filters with New Comment on, Your comment on the post, and There is a new comment to in the subject line. Send them all to a folder named Comment Replies.
• Create social media filters with @facebookmail.com, @twitter.com, @linkedin.com, and @youtube.com in the senders or from field. Send them all to a folder for that particular network.
• Getting a lot of emails from PR people without an option to unsubscribe? Create a PR People folder and start filtering each one as they come through to that folder.
• Filter clients into their own folder using their email address in the senders or from field.

One perk to Gmail over other email programs is that you can create a filter that will label specific emails but not automatically send them to the folders. That way, they will show up in your inbox so you can take action on them, then you can just easily click archive to move them to their folder for future reference. That way if the same person is always emailing you, you don’t have to keep scrolling through your labels / folders each time to organize their emails.

3. Unsubscribe to anything you’re not reading, don’t intent to read, or didn’t opt-in to immediately.

It sometimes feels faster to just delete something every time it hits your inbox. And, per email, it is. But if you are regularly deleting something without reading it, do you really want to continue letting it hit your inbox? Worse, do you want to stay subscribed to something you didn’t intentionally want to opt-in to in the first place?

Each time I get an email from someone I don’t recognize, I look for an unsubscribe or opt-out link on the email. You’ll usually find those links at the top or bottom of the email, especially ones that are in newsletter format or are from PR companies. It usually doesn’t take too long to unsubscribe, and it’s worth it not to have the next email from that list alerting your via your inbox notifications.

And for those particular nasty emailers who don’t have an unsubscribe link on their newsletters, I tend to mark them as spam and then create a filter to skip the inbox and delete them. This also goes for sites that make you try to login to an account that you don’t even remember creating to get to the unsubscribe option. It seems harsh, yet it’s the fastest way to go about things because you don’t want to spend all day trying to hunt someone down to remove you from their list.

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

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The Downtime Survival Guide

The guide below can be downloaded here: http://kiss.ly/survivaltime

Things to do before your site crashes…

1. Buy DNS backup service. A lot of downtime (and headaches) can be attributed to problems related to your DNS. DNS backup services constantly grab your DNS data and act as a backup if your primary DNS goes down.
2. Buy a monitoring service. You can purchase a service that pings your website every few minutes and notifies you (via text message, email, etc.) if it goes down.
3. Always backup your database. In addition to making regular backups of your website and databases, make sure you create an additional backup before tweaking the database itself.
4. Make sure your domain name registration is up to date. So many downtime fiascos could be solved by simply remembering to renew your domain name. Go ahead and set your domain name to auto renew. Or purchase your name for the next ten years and set the domain registrar lock.
5. Use Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). Using GWT is a no-brainer. It provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google and will notify you of any errors that are encountered while crawling it.
6. Use appropriate server downtime error codes. Be sure to use appropriate redirect server codes. Consult the internet or your IT team for proper use of server codes. Example: it’s generally better to tell crawlers that the downtime is temporary by returning a 503 HTTP result code (Service Unavailable) instead of returning an HTTP result code 404 (Not Found).

What to do if your site crashes…

1. Confirm that your site has gone down. Verify that your site is actually down. Make sure the problem isn’t your browser or internet connection. To be doubly sure, phone a friend and have them test your site.
2. Try to determine the cause. If you can, try to pinpoint why the downtime is occurring. Programming error? DNS problem? Expired domain? Hardware related?
3. Contact your hosting company or IT support. Get on the horn with your hosting company and see if they can assist you with your outage. Contact your IT support team or that super-nerdy neighbor of yours.
4. Notify users of the outage. Don’t leave your users in the dark. Put out a message on your social media accounts to let users know what’s going on and when you plan to have things up and running. If the outage is planned, send out an email beforehand letting users know the date and duration of the outage.
5. Regularly check in with your IT team. Regular communication with your IT team is crucial. Cooperate with them if they need any help finding information about your website or server. Get an estimate from them as to how long it will take for the problem to be resolved.
6. Stay calm. Chill out! It’s not the end of the world. Downtime affects the best of us. Staying calm will go a long way in making sure that you and your team can resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

Engagement
Many social networks track how their users interact with each other. Your site probably doesn’t have social features that allow users to message each other, but you still have some sort of user engagement. For example, your website visitors are engaging with you. Track where you users are navigating through your website and see what catches their eyes before they submit contact requests, leave feedback, or leave comments. This will help you understand what areas of your site cause users to engage and what areas don’t.

Viral growth
Social networks grow by users recommending the website to their friends. In most cases the recommendation is done through email or word of mouth. Now you probably can’t track word of mouth growth, but you can track email growth. If you notice that a good portion of your visitors are coming from emails, consider adding recommendation links on your website in which users can recommend your website or service to their friends easily. And ideally if it makes sense for your business, consider using a contact importer.

Addiction
There are certain aspects of social sites that cause tons of pageviews and cause users to come back on a regular basis. Most of these features are social features and they probably won’t work with your website, but what you can do is look for trends on what pages causes user to stick the longest and keep them viewing more pages. For example if you notice that case study pages are popular, then you may want to add more case study pages or other detailed content such as white papers.

Interaction
People tend to come back to social networks because they usually contact users voa email to come back. For example every time something new happens on Facebook, I get an email notification saying something new happened. What you should consider doing is collect emails from your website visitors. You can do this by just adding an email notification box on your website, which will ask people for their emails (you will be amazed at how many users will enter in their email). Anytime you have updates or news to release, you can always send out an email blast to your list.

Everything doesn’t have to be tangible
Virtual gifts have made social networks and applications millions of dollars. It is an easy way for them to monetize their properties and the cost of doing so is relatively low. Consider creating virtual ways to monetize your website and test out what is working for your website and what isn’t. Just because something works for your competitors doesn’t mean it is going to work for you and what doesn’t work for your competitors may work for you. Try not to just go with the standard ways of monetization, think outside the box.

Conclusion
There are a lot of things you can learn from social networks, you just have to get creative and start thinking how the features within social networks can be applied to your online business. More importantly when you are trying out these new features on your website, you need to start tracking the results. Some things will end up working out well for you and other things may not, but if you never try new things and don’t track all of the features on your web application or website, you’ll never know how to improve it.