Communications Spring Cleaning

You’ve got the itch to clean out your closet, organize the garage and weed the garden. The same drive can help you simplify and spruce up your professional communications.

Communication Spring Cleaning Tips:

Tame Your Email. Turn Off Your Email Notifications. Every time an alert pops up on your screen you are interrupting the work you’ve deemed important for the day. Schedule times that you check your email and stick to that schedule to give you control over your daily workflow. How often should be a reflection of your job function and workplace culture. Whether you check it once an hour or twice a day, it will be under your control and will no longer create a distraction. Consider setting up filters for spam and for common notifications (shopping and social media sites) so these move out of your inbox to a folder automatically that you can check as needed. Finally, start the process of emptying your inbox daily. Respond quickly to messages, delete unneeded messages, forward delegation emails, unsubscribe to any lists or newsletters you no longer need and file remaining messages. This will help you start each day with a clean slate.

Simplify Your Social Media. Similar to email, you should consider turning off your social media notifications. It is distracting and leads to lost time when you start to read other comments or postings. Limit the time you spend on social media sites. No one is going to look back on life and wish they’d spent more time reading about other people’s lunch dates, political rantings or taking quizzes about which ‘character they’d be.’ This may be difficult, but it will be liberating. You will gain hours in your week. Focus your time on what you need to accomplish through social media. There is a lot to be gained by a strategic use of social media platforms – having a social media plan can help you understand how to use the limited resource of time to augment your business, personal brand and bottom line.

Purge Your Website Content. In the spirit of cleaning things out, you should go through your organization’s website and remove any content that is no longer relevant. Previous logos, discontinued products, dead links and stale news should be deleted to make sure that visitors are focusing on what you want them to see. Take a hard look and see if the whole site could use a “refresh” – is there room for more interactivity with your customers? A better way to organize the information? A cleaner way to communicate your corporate brand? This is a great time of year to look critically at this important asset.

What are your thoughts? What are you doing this spring to clean up and simplify your professional communications?

Rebecca Wyhof is the President of Blue Roof Strategies, a boutique communications firm for companies and nonprofit organizations. For more about Blue Roof Strategies and to learn how they can help you achieve your goals, visit: www.blueroofstrategies.com.

To subscribe to Tricks of the Trade, email: rebecca@blueroofstrategies.com.