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I’ve worked with many small business owners who have let their inboxes, digital, physical or otherwise, get in the way from being truly productive. In fact, I’ve even found myself saying, “I’ll get to that project just after I’m done clearing this one…” While it’s a noble goal to have all your ducks in a row before starting on x, y or z, in 2013, that’s just not realistic.

So, be honest with yourself about whether or not your inboxes are holding you back, and in what way. You may want to make a quick list of what projects you’ve had at the back of your mind that have felt too overwhelming to start. Is it a big list? What is the potential cost to your business if you don’t move forward?

(2) Know what you’ve got – Take a quick inventory of what ‘inboxes’ you’re currently maintaining in your life. Some common ones:
Email inboxes (make sure to take note of each account)

• Your calendar
• Physical mail
• Voicemail
• Desktop inbox
• To do list(s)
• Sticky notes with reminders scattered across your desk and office
• Project files that contain items that need to be acted on

Don’t get me wrong – there are more. The point here is to get an idea of the places where you have information coming into your life, business or otherwise. Just make a simple list of all incoming items.

(3) Schedule it in – Let’s be realistic. There is no way you’re going to tackle all of those incoming items all at once! On your list, without thinking too much and going with your gut, rank the areas that you feel are the most urgent, in numerical order.

Head to your calendar. Block out 45 minutes for each of your top 5 areas on separate days. For example, if your main business inbox has hundreds of emails and you can’t recall who needs to be replied to, schedule this 45-minute block first.

Now, I can hear you already, “45 minutes??? It’s going to take me HOURS to do just one area.” I want to be clear that I’m not asking you to act on all of the items. You’re merely going to sort out as much as you can in that block of time. So go ahead! Start scheduling. If you’re a morning person, please schedule this first thing in the morning – and be sure to put each inbox on separate days, but hopefully in succession.

(4) Get a system – Once you’ve committed to going through each of your inboxes, you’ll need a system to track your projects and to-do items. There are hundreds of software programs, apps and websites out there that tout their system as the best. If you’re just starting out, though, all you need is an Excel spreadsheet to track the following:

• Project – i.e. Client: Shayna Kiln
• Task – i.e. Finalize proposal
• Due Date – i.e. April 4th 2013 (include month, date & year for sorting)
• The idea here is to get stuff out of the digital and physical clutter that surrounds you and into one single system.

As an aside: I personally love and recommend David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is a productivity system. Paired with Omnifocus, a Mac, iPad and iPhone software, I track all of my projects and action items in one place. Since this is a short article, I’ll spare you the details, but please do check out these sites if this article is piquing your interest.

(5) Get sorting – The 45-minute session you have booked with yourself is your way of getting things out of your inboxes and into some coherent order. Before recording your actionable items into your system, you’ll want to have three categories for sorting, which apply to digital and physical items:

• Action
• Keep
• Delete/Throw Away
• Yes, it’s that simple. I recommend spending the first 30 minutes being ruthless – let’s say you’re sorting email. You’ll literally want folders (or labels in Gmail/Google Apps) with the titles above:
• @Action
• @Keep
• Trash (standard bin)

To keep things going smoothly, only drag and drop the items into the relevant folders for now – please don’t waste your time labeling or dragging an item into a specific folder to ‘Keep’ unless you already have a system for this and are confident. It will slow you down.

After your 30 minute quick sort, spend the remaining 15 minutes recording your actions to the items in your email inbox or desk tray labeled ‘Action’.

* * *

Just having all of the action items in one place will give you dramatic peace of mind. You can always schedule more time to do more of your inboxes, but I guarantee just 45 minutes will make a huge dent at the start. If you want to extend your time, great! Remember, keep it simple and push through a few rounds of inbox clearing. You’ll feel more focused and ready to take on those projects you’ve been putting off.

• Ensure that your domain name has an available -.com extension - Even if you’re not too concerned about web traffic at the start, -.com is still the standard extension that users expect to use for your business. Oh yes, and always register the -.net and -.org extensions along with your -.com!
• Keep it short - there are lots of rules out there, but do your best to keep the length of the name to 20 characters or less to ensure it’s easy to type. Along with brevity, be sure to avoid difficult to spell names, especially involving ‘q’ and ‘x’ which are often mistaken for other letters.
• Avoid hyphens (and numbers too) - If your business name is ‘Chameleon Coaching’ for example (www.ChameleonCoaching.com is free, but a premium domain name), avoid hyphenating it to www.Chameleon-Coaching.com. Most visitors to your site expect simplicity, and hyphens and numbers are hard to explain verbally (nine or 9 can be easily confused).
• Avoid copyright infringement - Please do double check to ensure that your domain name is not similar to an existing trademark. Sites such as KnowEm, below, will check this for you.
• Build your brand - Let’s say you own a business selling socks, simply buying the domain name www.PrettySocks.com probably isn’t going to cut it, as it is slightly generic. Do your best to snag a domain name that explains what you do. If you are a coach, for example, and your business is called ‘Integrated Life Ltd’, you may want to add an extra name, such as ‘Coaching’ or ‘Solutions’ to the end to ensure you maintain the integrity of your brand without losing the business name.

• Facebook - Get 25 ‘likes’ on your page and you can immediately choose a vanity URL at http://www.facebook.com/username.
• YouTube - Now that Google owns YouTube, you can set up your channel using a Gmail or Google Apps Email account (@YourDomain.com).
• Twitter - You can only have 15 characters in your username, so here is an appropriate place to shorten if you need to (here at Happily Organized we shortened our name to twitter.com/happilyo).
• LinkedIn - Head to http://www.linkedin.com/company/linkedin and snag your username, as LinkedIn is continually improving its company pages to allow for custom images and service offerings.
• Skype - Do your best to grab a free account from Skype, to keep business separate from personal (expert tip: leave it on and set up a professional voice message to collect enquiries instead of giving away your personal phone # when starting out).

And now for the best checking tools…