I can imagine being on the other end of being asked to send in the “snow” – your empty inbox at the end of the day with 0 to prioritize, 0 to plan and 0 Today. On first glance, this request may seem a bit over the top. I get it.

If you still feel that way after reading this, then, by all means, feel free to stop, but hopefully, this will shed some light on exactly why we request snowmails, and why exactly 20.

First, you should know that we call them snowmails because the objective is to have lots of white (snow) in your inbox.

Second, I want you to know that this service is for you. It actually takes up quite a bit of resources to monitor “the snow”, but we do it because our experience tells is it’s a game-changer.

Third, it might be helpful to know that before we started requesting snowmails many years ago, the level of adoption of our customers was just a little over 50%, and puzzlingly enough it didn’t matter how excited a...

Probably the biggest challenge novice LeanMailers face is writing proper Next Actions (NAs) that make an impact on your brain. When your NAs are generic, your brain struggles to remember what the NAs pertained to. The result, then, is an increase in time-spend, not a decrease — without any return on investment

The reason

Generic NAs don’t hook into your memory, which means that you spend time writing them without receiving time-savings in return. Good intentions going in, but pure rubbish going out.

This is easily solved by getting a better understanding of, and putting more focus on, the WHAT of your NAs. (Remember that a NA is made up of a Who – What combination.

Words like: action, apply, read, follow up, (verbs in general) are not hooks that snag your memory. You need Whats, which are typcially nouns.

Are you saying that we can’t use verbs 

It’s not that you can’t...

Sneak Peek - InstantArchive

Categorization

When we categorize emails, we are doing so in order to be able to locate them quickly and easily. Beginning with that end in mind, since all your mails will be placed in one folder, we should not be thinking in hierarchies (folder in a folder in a folder…) when we create categories; instead, we should understand that we are affixing one or more meta-tags (like #tags) to emails.

With a hierarchical mindset we would be tempted to create complicated multi-word categories like:  Customer – West Coast – Acme tools.

With a meta-tag mindset, we would be thinking more universally.  We might attach two different categories, like: Acme tools (the name of the company), Ball peen hammer (the tool they ordered).

In a hierarchical approach we organize from general to specific.  In a meta-tag or category approach we think of the characteristics that would best help us locate the mail at a later date — afterall,...