The pace of the world today is hectic. Why is it so much faster than that of yesteryear? Why is "Island Time" so much more relaxed?

It comes down to communication. The world moves at the speed of communciation. When all communication was written in ink on a page and carried in a sack by a horse; everything moved slower. Then came faster horses, then faxes, emails and now WhatsApp, Slack and Zoom.

The good news is that we can't get communication happening much faster than it does now, so my prediction is that the world won't keep getting faster and more hectic. Phew, because I don't think I could keep up.

How do you manage your emails?
I am the active founder of 4-6 businesses, angel investor in a dozen more, on the board of a few companies and mentor at 3 universities. Plus I have personal matters to deal with like anyone else. So yes, I expect I receive more emails than the average person... sometimes I can get many hundreds of emails a day.

I often get asked why I'm not drowning in email. Here's my method.

Inbox Zero
It all starts with the goal of Inbox Zero - this is what my inbox looks like right now:

Zero emails in my Inbox, a relaxing Sunday night and plenty of time to write a blog post. But how?

I just found a business training document I wrote in 2007 which talked about managing emails - it is a discipline which takes practice! 

1. Touch each email ONCE
I'm old enough to have read books and listened to seminars by self-help guru Brian Tracy. I expanded his strategy for dealing with Paper on your Desk to apply to emails.

Re-reading emails is one of the biggest wastes of time ever! Leaving emails in your inbox means you read, or glance at them, again and again and again. Some I'm sure you've seen 50 or 100 times and still done nothing about.

Be absolutely ruthless and look at each email ONCE only! This ABCD technique was what I used in 2007 for each email (or paper document):
A Take Action, immediately deal with it (then archive it)
B Bin – if it isn’t going to be useful, throw it away! Delete it!
C Classify – file it where it can be found when needed (archive)
D Delegate to the appropriate person (forward and archive)

These days I don't bother with classifying or filing emails. Gmail has an Archive button and any email which isn't deleted gets archived. If I need it then I use the search and can find it way more easily than if I'd put a label on it and filed it into some folder I need to browse. Gmail's search is very powerful and I am always able to find the email I'm looking for.

Touch each email once, then get it out of your inbox by archiving it.

2. Check your email
This might sound a bit weird, but I'm saying you should schedule a time to check your email and NOT have it open on your phone or desktop all day. If you get notifications from your Inbox, turn them off. Notifications are a distraction from your focus on priority matters.

I usually check my email at the start of my day - allocating up to 2 hours to deal with everything. Productivity improves dramatically 15 minutes after you start something, and declines when you start to tire, after 1-2 hours depending on your stamina. I check again just after lunch (only half-hour allocation) and then finally another hour on emails before I sign-out for the day. My goal is to sign-out each day with an empty inbox. Inbox zero.

If "doing your emails" is your priority task then you'll give it your full focus and actually be able to deal with the emails. If you have other priorities then you'll end up reading your emails and thinking "I've no time to reply now"... if you didn't give yourself time to reply, why are you reading it in the first place? 
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3. Your inbox is a list of small Things To Do
Each tool you use must be 'fit for purpose'. Emails are not for chatting, for that use a messenger program. Emails are not for remembering to got to a meeting, for that use a calendar.

Your Email Inbox is a list of things to do - but each of those items should take you between 5 and 45 minutes to complete. You must be able to open the email once, take action, complete the task and archive the email. If the email is asking you to write a book - it's not something which should stay in your inbox. For larger tasks create a card on your Trello Board or other Work prioritization tool. 

If that email asks you to write a book then reply you would create the Card on your Trello board, maybe link to the email, then archive the email. Once you finish your book you can easily find the email and hit reply.

4. Unsubscribe from stuff
Almost every interaction you make on the web ends up with your email address being on a subscriber list. If you are deleting an email, there is a good chance you might want to unsubscribe as well. ​Believe me, the fraction of a second investment in unsubscribing now will save you hours of receiving, opening and deleting emails in the future. 

Invest a little effort now to save a lot in the future. And not just with email - delayed gratification is the pathway to riches.

Priority Inbox

Gmail is very smart - and it learns from your behaviour. Take advantage of this.

Sometimes you don't have enough time to deal with all your emails in one session, so which ones will you leave behind? Having them prioritized for you makes it easy ... deal with the Important stuff first, everything else can come later.

These are my custom Settings for the Priority Inbox.

I have no emails in my inbox, so it's hard to show you - but the four sections expand when you have emails. I usually have them hide automatically when there are no emails in that section. 

Snooze for a timely reminder

Some emails are time sensitive. Don't leave them sitting in your inbox where they clog up your working memory and force you to look at them every time you check your email. Get every email out of your inbox after one touch.... Snooze the email to show up in your inbox right at the time when you do need to deal with it!

You can see my Snoozed emails here... a few are set to show up on Monday morning when I can deal with them - I just didn't want them clogging up my inbox during the weekend. One is for an event starting on Tuesday, so it will show up on Tuesday, a couple I even emailed myself as a reminder to pickup something or do some regulatory task at a specific date. And one is a financial check which I need to remember to do at the end of the year.

The key takeaway is to use email as a To Do list, and Snooze is much easier than adding a Calendar reminder (calendar appointments are only to remind me that I need to be somewhere at a particular place and a time).  

Quick scan of Spam

Things do end up in Spam, so every week or two I'll have a quick scan through all the emails which have been caught by the Spam box. Sometimes I'll find things which aren't really Spam and I'll reclassify them. Then you know what I do? I empty the Spam box! I want even SpamBox Zero. :)

Send + Archive

Make sure you have this setting turned on. 99% of the time you should be clicking Send and Archive - then you can quickly move to the next item in your Inbox (list of things to do). Very rarely will you send an email reponse and leave the email in your inbox for futher action. Each email should be touched only once.

If you don't see this button, go into Settings and turn it on.

Legend tells us that the same amount of effort is required to build a Billion Dollar business as a Million Dollar business, so you may as well aim high.

I just can't believe that can be true. 

Maybe I don't believe it because I haven't built a Billion Dollar business. But, if were true, surely more people would be running Billion Dollar businesses? 

Maybe it is the same amount of effort, just a lot less likely to happen. Do investors tell the story because they prefer to aim for 1000x upside with only 100x more risk? Is that extra risk acceptable for a founder?

The downside for investors is expected. They lose some money. But, it's Early Stage business, the highest risk asset class there is, and a diversified High-Risk portfolio is usually less than 5% of the investor's net worth and the business that fails is only one of 20 in the portfolio.

It's a lot easier for the investor to take on extra risk, especially when returns scale-up profitably. However, a founder might be risking 100% of their Net Worth and "failure is simply not an option".

Would you rather take a 0.1% chance of making a Billion Dollars or 90% chance of making a Million Dollars?

I know the mathematically correct answer, but I've thinking about this in the context of what your goals might be when starting a business. I start with a question:
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​HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU NEED?

There are many reasons why someone starts a business:

• create positive social impact
• solve a problem
• help the community, create jobs
• follow a passion, become a leader
• create a flexible lifestyle
• creative expression or leave a legacy
• learn new things, etc

All this can be achieved in many ways, but the key aspect of a business is achieving these goals within a commercial framework. Founders are, by their very nature, ambitious people and I don't expect their financial goals are minimum wage equivalent. Most would want to become "rich" along the way. What exactly does that mean?
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Here is what I thought about in order to quantify my answer:

How does ASIC define it?
To qualify as a Sophisticated Investor in Australia you need $250k annual income or $2.5M in net assets. (1)

Net Assets for Retirement
​ASFA estimates the average superannuation balance required to achieve a comfortable retirement would be $640,000 for couples. (2)

However, Nathan Zahm, investment strategist at Vanguard, recommends a balance somewhere between $800,000 and $1.6 million. (3)

These figures assume that a retiree owns their own home outright and is in reasonable health.

Net Worth in Australia
The average net worth for all Australian households in 2017–18 was $1.0 million. (4)

The top 20% are known as "high wealth households" and have average net assets of $3.2 million. (4) Which matches pretty closely the $1.6 million figure above.

Assuming a $1.2 million home, this requires $2 million in other assets.

Income In Australia
The mean weekly household income is $2,242 ($116,584 per year). While the median (50th percentile) is $1701 per week ($88,500). (4)

According to the 2017-18 Survey of Income and Housing, Australian households that earned $4275 a week were in the 90th percentile, which means they are in the top 10 per cent of income earners in the country. If your goal is to be in the top 10% of earners you need annual income of $222,300 before tax. (6)

If your ambitions are loftier, the top 0.2% of the population have annual income of $416,000 or more. (7)

Rich Lists
AFR Rich List 2019 shows you need $472 million to crack the top 200 in Australia and get onto this list. (8) The average age is 66 and encouragingly, 150 of the 200 are "self-made".

The Rich List shows the richest 0.0008% of the population.
Spending just $1350 on Powerball tickets would give you about the same 0.0008% chance of winning $150 million, with a lot less effort than running a business. (It's one ticket per week for 20 years.)

One wonders how realistic a goal (remember SMART goals?) it is to get onto this list.

So what's my answer?
I suggest founders first target $90,000 annual income with a goal to reach ~4x around $350,000.

Accumulating (before you are 65) around $7 million in assets would allow you to retire and (at 5% yield) retain an income at around that $350k. Sure, you need to do this 67 times to get onto the Rich List, but it's a good start!

Put this into perspective. You'd be 2x the average of the top 20% of Australian households. Australia being the 21st richest country in the world and an average Australian is already in the top 1% wealthiest worldwide. (5)

Translate that into Business Revenue
A $2m revenue business (6.9% of all Australian businesses generate >$2m) should be able to generate $350k in profits. You could sell this business, but it would be unlikely to provide your entire asset accumulation budget. But, run it for 10 years and invest your profits and you'll be there.

Let's say your business is your entire asset portfolio and you draw minimal income, you probably want to grow business revenue to between $6 - $10 million (2.95% of businesses reach >$5m) to get a trade sale and bank your $7m in cash. (9)
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Interestingly, businesses between $5m - $10m in revenue have the highest survival rate.

In Summary
I'm confident working with any great founder to become a top 3% business.
I don't concern myself with hunting Unicorns (0.01% of all businesses). 

To keep the downside risk small and ensure Founders always win, I like to see Early Stage startups with a 90%+ chance of reaching $2m in revenue. They should also have a 50%+ chance of reaching $10m and then if there happens to be a 0.1% chance of $100m, well that's just icing on an already delicious cake.

People often look at their results and wish they would change. It's important to realise that your results are an outcome and not the root cause.

Behaviours (or actions) produce results. What drives your behaviour? Behaviour is the external expression of your Values.

Attitude is the internal representation, or applied beliefs and values.

Values describe the worth that a person attaches to something. It's a mechanism for life prioritisation. What's important to you in the context. In turn, values are based on Belief.

Beliefs are your internal feelings, which are accepted as truth. They may be unproven or even irrational, but are still accepted as truth.

To find out more about Values development, I like the work of Abe Maslow and Robert Hardman.

So, for better results:

1. Update your Beliefs
2. Re-prioritise your Values
3. Adjust your Attitude
4. Modify your Behaviours
5. Expect different Results