3 Kick-Butt Tools to Unclutter Your Business Life (Part 2 of 3)

Copyright (c) 2008 Chris Zavadowski

As your entrepreneurial life takes off, you'll find your business slowly getting cluttered with repetitive, frustrating (and often time-wasting) tasks. It's all too easy to lose hours a week  or hours a DAY  focusing on things that aren't productive, instead of pouring your energy into profit-producing activities.

Which means, it's critical you recognize the "time vampires", as Dan Kennedy calls them, and put an end to them once and for all. Kill them as soon as they start cluttering your day.

That's why I'm a *huge* fan of outsourcing these tasks so you can have more fun (and time) in your life. But outsourcing doesn't always have to be to another person - it can mean handing something off to software or 3rd-party systems that handle the heavy lifting.

So with "Organize Your Home Office Day" recently being celebrated, I thought it would be the perfect time to share three of my favorite kick-butt, time-saving tools with you in this three-part series. In part #1, I hit on the ins and outs of Google's awesome free Calendar service. Now on to part #2...

CLUTTER REDUCER #2: Spam Arrest (spamarrest.com)

In today's world, the biggest time waster is EASILY email. Much has been written on regaining control of your inbox, controlling our email addictions and more, so I'm not going to spend time covering a topic that's been thoroughly covered. Instead, I'm going to focus on the biggest email clutter culprit (and how to kill it).

Do the math and you'll see you're losing days, if not weeks, each year deleting spam. 10 minutes a day x 5 days a week x 50 work weeks a year = almost 42 hours spent deleting spam each year. That's at least a FULL work week totally lost to email you never want to see in the first place! And if your business is bigger...you can easily tack on another week or two of wasted time.

So since this article series is about reducing clutter - and nothing clutters up your computer time like spam - I highly recommend you check out Spam Arrest. For the last 3+ years, this inexpensive, but powerful, service has been protecting me from hundreds of thousands of spam messages.

In fact, in the last week alone it's blocked 7,493+ pieces of spam sent to my personal inbox (our company email addresses get 4-5x that amount). Yikes!

Essentially it works on a challenge/response system. Someone emails you, and the service emails them back asking for verification they are a real person. It happens ONE time and BAM...the person now makes it to your inbox...while all the other spam emails never see the light of day.

Of course you have full control over everything, so you can block emails, import your contacts ahead of time and do much more. Plus if you take an extra hour or two to set it up, your contacts don't even need to know you're using it.

Just like Google Calendar, Spam Arrest can pull everything into one centralized location. It checks multiple email accounts for me...dropping them all into my master inbox. That way I'm not wasting more time trying to manage multiple inboxes. The tiny amount of time it takes to get all the legit emails on your "whitelist" is WELL worth the weeks of your life that will be saved. This service is highly recommended for everyone who relies uses in email in their business or personal lives!

And stay tuned for the final clutter reducer which will free you from the time trap of voicemail once and for all!