Hello every one and thank you for visiting my blog.

When you start working from home one of the biggest challenges you face are the distractions from your work, and there are lots of them to deal with.

Noises from around the house like the dog barking, the TV blaring out, the phone ringing or the washing machine going through its last cycle is enough to interrupt your concentration and mess up your work schedule.

We can however take steps to reduce them. Give the dog a bone to chew, turn the TV off, remove the batteries from the door bell and close all the doors to isolate the noise from the washing machine. Turning the Answer phone on and the phone to silent is also a big help.

You can also make a few simple rules. For example, my wife and children now know that when my bedroom door is closed I am at work and do not wish to be interrupted.

Once you have those distractions dealt with it should be plain sailing….
But it isn’t always that simple as there are other distractions, like email marketing!!

For years I used the email address that I set up with my ISP when I first got online. Over time I started getting more and more emails that had absolutely nothing to do with me, sometimes over 1,000 a day, and most of them were for those V V Voom tablets. I got in touch with my ISP and spoke to them about it and was basically told “yes that happens, all you can do is close your account”, (they’re so helpful aren’t they).

Sure I could get another email address, which I did, but with email marketing being as hot as it is I had subscribed to quite a few lists and didn’t want to go back to the start of their auto responder sequences. So I set up some message rules and folders, so that if an email was from so and so it would go into this or that folder. This was a big help but I was still getting over 1,000 emails a day to sort through.

Fortunately I now have a couple of websites and have created email addresses to go with them. So for a week or two I monitored all emails coming in. I only opened those that I had subscribed to, or ones from friends and family.

At the bottom of all the newsletters that I was on was (is) a link to unsubscribe or change subscriber options, I clicked each one and changed from my old to my new email address. I then stopped checking the offending email account every 30 minutes, (which was done automatically) and checked it only once a week to see if any other emails were coming through that were of importance to me. I did this for three weeks and got thousands of emails but NONE were meant for me. So I have stopped using that email address altogether and am now able to work without being bombarded with trash.

As I said I’m fortunate to have a couple of websites and have created my own email accounts. If you’re not in a position to do this then you can get a new email address from Yahoo, msn, hotmail or visit
http://mail.google.com/mail/signup and follow the simple instructions.

I would advise you to have two email addresses; one for family and friends and the other for all the email marketing lists that you’re on and maybe for eBay. That way you can check your emails without fear of 100’s or 1,000’s of unwanted trash and concentrate on what you are doing at your computer; WORKING!

Now when I get to my PC to start work, I start work immediately rather than spending up to an hour sifting through the unwanted emails. Not only does this save me time but the stress that goes with it.

I hope this helps you if you’re in a similar position.

I’m thinking of making a video to show you how to set up message rules with Outlook Express, if this is of interest to you please leave a comment saying so and I’ll put one together. You may want to sign up to my newsletter so that you can be notified when the video is online.

Until next time…

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