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Six Ways to Win the War Over Your Work Area and Information Overload.
5. Sort your old papers and emails using a ‘D’ box
One of the many challenges of being a ‘road warrior’ is the number of pieces of paper and electronic information that you end up collecting throughout your days and weeks of being on the road. It doesn’t take too long until your inbox is full of unimportant emails, or your A4 notebook and compendium are carrying customer newsletters, copies of a competitor’s brochures, random information and other odd bits and pieces you can’t quite remember why you are keeping. If you find yourself with lots of this ‘unimportant’ information or emails, do something about it and make up a ‘D’ box folder in your email program, as well a physical ‘D’ box made out of cardboard, which you can keep under your desk.
In this instance, ‘D’ is for Dump and a ‘D’ box is a place to store random bits of either electronic or hand-written information that you’re not quite sure if you will need again. For example, you might have picked up a customer’s newsletter from the reception area of your customer’s office while you were waiting for an appointment. At the time you thought it was a good idea to have a quick look through the newsletter and update yourself about what is happening in the company. Several days later you still haven’t got around to looking through the newsletter and, chances are, you’re probably not going to do this as you now have other more important things to do.
Therefore, rather than throwing the newsletter away in the rubbish bin, you could put it into your ‘D’ box – that small cardboard box located under your desk. If the information is electronic, you do the same thing in a folder called ‘D’ box, which you set up in your email program.
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