Do you avoid emails?
Do you wince when you open an email and have to scroll to see all of the content?
Do you allow your emails to build up into the hundreds and then just have to bolt yourself to your office chair with a pot of coffee and go through them all at once?
You are not alone.
For those of us with a neurodiversity in reading (dyslexia, ADHD) emails can be some form of hell.
Years ago, I had a client who tossed out all emails at the end of the week that they had not replied to, saying that if they didn’t address it, it wasn’t that important.
They ran a large company with 50+ employees. We shifted that practice, as it was clear it was only working to make them feel better about having a clean inbox and not working for communication.
I’ll come back to this story later.
If you fight with opening and dealing with your email inbox, you don’t have to anymore.
There are so many good tools and technologies that can be applied to transform your inbox into a simple and easy communication tool.
The number one technology I recommend for this type of resistance and fight with email is Speechify https://speechify.com/ premium. The pennies it costs each day for this tool are well worth the sanity it brings.
With the press of a button, you can have your emails read to you, in any accent you like or don’t want.
The best part is that you can do this at any speed that works best for you. I have clients who can go through 50 emails in 30 minutes because they listen to them at such a high speed.
Now add in the voice-to-text feature for responding, which most email software now has, this way you can turn email into an interactive audiobook.
As a neurodiverse person, it can be easy to get used to things being the way they have always been.
I challenge you to stay up to date on some of the latest adaptive tools and make time to test and try different things.
That is how the most successful different thinkers thrive in life. They adapt and evolve quickly and keep an eye out for tools that will assist them to be more efficient.
I owe you the rest of the story, speechify had not been created at that time or we would have implemented it for my client who was tossing out all their emails on Fridays.
They didn’t actually toss them. They moved them into a folder and ignored them so they had that nice clean inbox when they left work on Friday.
As you can guess this behavior was delaying company growth as projects were not moving forward as they should, because people were waiting for communication back on what to do next.
To shift the situation, we added an hour a day from an office admin to sort and purge the email to only what they had to respond to and deleted and delegated the rest.
That simple step was huge. We then added dictation software so they could respond to emails by just talking the text out.
Within three months the company was back on its growth path and the staff was a whole lot happier and my client had stopped hating and avoiding email.
It amazes me to this day how much technology has improved my life and how quickly it continues to create adaptive and time-saving tools. I am grateful every day.
What are your favorite innovations?
If you want to save time figuring out the latest technology that could simplify your life, and implementing it, you could benefit from some time working with a coach.
Have a great week,
JoyGenea
* I have not received any gifts or discounts from Speechify for promoting them, this is my opinion.