161: Inbox Taming with Yaro Starak

Processing email and social media inboxes is overwhelming enough for one person — can you imagine creating an entire company to help entrepreneurs do this at scale?! Communication curmudgeon that I am, I most certainly cannot.

That’s why I invited today’s guest, Yaro Starek, to share the systems and approaches behind Inbox Done, his company that helps clients tame the never-ending email beast.

More About Yaro: Yaro Starak is the co-founder of InboxDone.com, an email management company with a team of 45+ serving clients, including restaurant owners, venture capitalists, accountants, doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, car retailers, online coaches, and more. He is the host of the Vested Capital podcast, author of Blog Profits BluePrint, and angel investor. Yaro has been featured in SkyNews, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Huffington Post, Business Insider, Foundr, and hundreds of media outlets and events.

🌟3 Key Takeaways:

• Yaro believes it’s best to have two team members entirely dedicated to email, not just a fraction of one VA’s time, which often just replicates the problems you have with staying on top of it yourself. Build in redundancy for handling communications. 

• Determine where you most want to receive different kinds of information such as daily summaries, details about leads and inquiries, personal matters, time sensitive client requests, etc — then create SOPs for how you get the information you need where you can most easily deal with it. 

• If your inbox is your to-do list then you are at risk of two things: You will not be able to fully delegate it, and it might not be the best way to prioritize your work.

📝Permission: To be involved in — not responsible for — your inbox.

✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Check out Jenny’s Stuck Email Categories template and start observing what the most common types of emails are (and subsequent processes to document) that you might be able to delegate in the future. 

📘Books Mentioned:

• Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Blog Profits Blue Print by Yaro Starak

• A World Without Email by Cal Newport

• Unsubscribe by Jocelyn Glei

• The Tyranny of Email by John Freeman

🔗Resources Mentioned:

• Yaro on the web, Instagram: @yarostarak, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook

• InboxDone.com

• Yaro’s podcast: Vested Capital and course: Laptop Lifestyle Academy

• Article: How To Hire, Test And Train A Virtual Assistant To Handle Your Email 

• Tools: Yesware, SaneBox, Calendly, HelpScout (what JB uses for team emails), HubSpot, Slack

🎧Related Podcast Episodes:

• 002: Eliminate Email with Cal Newport

• 006: Going Pro on Podcasting with Jordan Harbinger

• 019: Most Valuable Activities with Dave Crenshaw

• 145: Tips for Training Part-Time Team Members with Kaneisha Grayson

• 104: Save Someone Next Steps

• 035: The Long Game with Dorie Clark and Pivot 298: Networking in a New Niche and Becoming Broadway Investors with Dorie Clark and Alisa Cohn

💻 Access Free Time episode transcripts on Podscribe »

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