EP39: Scott Friesen - How To Master Your Inbox & Increase Your Productivity

Emails.

According to our return guest, productivity expert and owner of Simpletivity, Scott Friesen, he says the average professional spends 6.3 hours per day tending to their emails in some capacity.

Those are easily hours that could be dedicated to more important things, but for many reasons we're choosing to be a slave to our inboxes.

Today that's about to end.

It's time you take a stand and Scott will help.

During this informative interview, you'll learn...

  • Why you should space out the time in between checking emails

  • How to turn off your email notifications

  • Why it's important to acknowledge email requests quickly & provide a deadline to address them

To find out more about Scott, visit here.

To view Scott's How To Remove Badge App Icons On Your iPhone Or iPad video, click here.   

To watch Scott's How To Turn Off Outlook Notifications video, explore this link.

To check out Scott's How To Use Trello As A Powerful To-Do List video, investigate here

To learn about Slack, here's the link.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

Michael Palmer: 01:12 Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today our guest is making a return to this podcast. After our listeners couldn't stop raving about his last appearance. He is a productivity expert who has dedicated his life to helping others through his company simple activity and is an overall amazing guy. Welcome back, Scott Friesen. 

Scott Friesen: 01:36 Thank you so much, Michael. Glad to be back on the podcast. 

MP: 01:40 Well thanks for joining us. Now. For those who didn't hear your first appearance, I recommend that they go back and listen to the previous episode on The Successful Bookkeeper podcast, but maybe give us just a little bit about your career background before running your company today. 

SF: 01:59 Sure thing. So I spent much of the early part of my career in the software and technology industry and in particular I was a software product manager and for those of you may be not familiar with that term, a product manager is really responsible for the life cycle of a software or multiple software products. So you know, I really enjoyed that you really get an opportunity to interface with all aspects of the business since you're the one in charge of developing and improving those products. You're working directly, not only with the development teams but with the sales teams, with the marketing teams, with the support teams, everything within the organization. But I also really love to be able to branch out with the customers themselves. You really need to know what is going on for the, uh, for the people that you're serving. So I loved that role and I guess we're where things spawned for me in terms of branching out into a productivity consultant in a cold coach is that in that world of software developments, uh, probably one of my greatest strengths was taking complex ideas or very challenging or complex processes and boiling them down to their most simple form. 

SF: 03:16 You know, how can we take something that is a multiple steps and how can we take something that involves a lot of numbers and, and perhaps a lot of clicks and how can we reduce that down to make it as easy as possible to the, uh, to the user. And so that's what I've tried to bring with my own companies, simple activity and the teachings that I deliver to individuals and organizations around productivity. And time management. I honestly feel that we are all at our productive best when we keep things simple. It's very easy, incredibly easy to make things difficult. And I'm here to try and try and make things more easy and as a result make you more productive. 

MP: 03:57 Beautiful, excellent. And I think that's why so many love you is that you help them make things simple and their life gets better, which is, which is the feedback that we've been getting. And recently a pure bookkeeping licensee. One of our clients, she recently was a guest on our show. That's Lisa Campbell Marchese. And uh, she told us about how much value she received from a Webinar that you'd done for the Institute of professional bookkeepers. And that's, uh, an association for bookkeepers here in Canada on email management. And she had a really big improvement in her productivity around email. So I'd love for you to share some of the biggest mistakes that people are making when they're dealing with their email. And we'll actually look at the content that came from that Webinar and help our listeners today get something that they can take away and start doing and their and their email management. 

SF: 04:55 Sure thing, first of all, thank you so much for the endorsement Lisa and yeah, thank you for all those. Uh, as a part of those, uh, webinars that were put on through IPBC, I was told it was some of the uh, some of the largest that the IPBC association had put on in the Webinar format. Email is, is often, you know, my most frequently requested topic and I think it's something that all of us can relate to. You know, still, here in 2017, email is the number one form of business communication. Despite the advances in texting, we're texting a lot more these days despite all the ways we can instant message one another. Whether that's through social media platforms or perhaps other applications that you may use within your business. We are still using email more than, uh, than any other communication tool available to us. 

SF: 05:51 You know, I think one of the things where, where we often go wrong, one of the, one of the places that I start off with when I'm an individual or, or coaching a team is just how frequently we check our email. Most people are surprised to learn that in a recent study, uh, it was determined that the average professional spends 6.3 hours a day dealing with email. I mean, think about that 6.3 hours. That's about a third of your waking hours on a typical working day. And of course it's not just reading emails, it's not just replying to emails, but think of how often you're just browsing, right? Think of how often you, you take out your smartphone and you're just, uh, thumbing through messages or you're just managing messages, right? You're dragging things into folders, you're adding flags. That 6.3-hour number is, is everything. 

SF: 06:47 Anytime that you are interacting with email in some way, shape or form. And I think often we do this because we, we tend to inflate or overinflate the importance of email, right? We think that we need to be on top of everything. As soon as it reaches our inbox, we need to be in the know. We need to be able to reply or reply to all to certain emails and that type of thing. And yet when I ask people, when people who arrive or show up at my workshops, when I asked them, of all the emails you receive in a typical day, what percentage do you consider important? Or what percentage do you consider urgent that really provided value to you? Or it gave you an opportunity to, to really, uh, contribute or help someone out? And usually, the response is somewhere between 10 and 20%. 

SF: 07:42 Well, I think that's a relatively low percentage when you think of the number of emails you receive on a typical day. Yet time and time again, we tend to have our emails, our inbox open and in front of us at all, uh, at all times. And we're so quick to reply to new messages that come in are in our way. So I usually encourage people to see if you can reduce the amount of time that you spend in between interacting with your email. Can you go as long as, as two hours, for example, without checking your emails so that you can, um, you can get back to the things that are most important to you? You can get back to your most important work. 

MP: 08:21 It's remarkable how much we are connected to our devices, to our computers. I mean, everything we do, we're, we're on the cloud of cloud computing and it started out, I get, it's almost difficult to imagine and think about, remember I, you know, go back in our memory to what it was like before email and cloud computing. What did we do all day? 

SF: 08:48 Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it is so easy and I think that's part of the problem, right? It's so easy for me to communicate with or to send you a message. And for those of us receiving all that communication, it's become that much more difficult for us to decipher what's important or what is not important. I mean, if you go back a few decades ago, we had, you know, memos, paper memos that may have been printed on a particular color or something like that would have been placed on a, on desks within an office. And that was like an official form of communication. Right? Well now, of course, we don't get paper memos anymore, but we still get email, uh, memos, email notifications, email announcements, and the right beside our newsletters or marketing emails and sales that are happening in our, uh, in our local shopping center, whatever the case may be. It is so much more difficult I think to filter out the, the difference between what's valuable or what's important and everything else. 

MP: 09:55 Yeah. And it, it, you know, it's interesting how when someone had to communicate with someone, they had to pick up the phone or they had to send a fax. And I mean, even fax, fax is, are not that old, but they, they were around for a while, which is a barrier, a barrier to entry. So it would have, someone would have to think to themselves, Hey, do I really need to send this or I have to walk all the way over the cross the room to call somebody or I have to dial these numbers. There's a barrier. Whereas now sending an email or sending a text or sending any kind of communications, very, very little barrier to entry, so people do it. They just say like, oh, I have an, I have a thought here. I'm going to send an email or have another thought. I'll send another email, which is part of the problem where we're part of the problem as much as the world and the way that we're working right now is part of the problem.

SF: 10:49 I'm thinking, Oh, I, I think you're absolutely right. In fact, I've, I've suggested two a to people more so for a laugh, but what if there was a dollar value? Right? What if there was some type of monetary value with each and every one of your emails? Let's say it costs you a dollar for every single email that you sent. Would you be sending as many as you currently do today? And I think the obvious answer is no, of course, I don't, I don't recommend that any organization instills such a, such a program within their, uh, within their company. But I think we would look at it differently, right? If there was either some type of penalty or some type of direct costs and there is a direct cost. I mean, it is our time. It's other people's time. Unfortunately, we don't always think about that when we're sending so many of our emails.

MP: 11:36 Yeah, it really, really is. And so how do you start to move people to a better place with their, with their email behavior? 

SF: 11:47 Well, you know, a couple of tips that a, that I can share with you and, and uh, and the listeners today. One is to see if you can turn off as many of your email notifications as you can. And I'm talking both about your desktop notifications but also notifications that you may be receiving on your, on your smartphone. If you're a Microsoft Outlook user, I can almost guarantee you're familiar with the little notification that appears on the lower right-hand side of your screen for every single email that you receive. Or at least initially that's I believe still the default setting in Microsoft outlook. And you know sometimes that notification can be helpful, right? It tells you the, the subject, it tells you the sender and sometimes you can even see the first sentence or first part of the sentence of that email message. But we're receiving so many emails that are such a major distraction. 

SF: 12:45 If your eyes are glancing to the lower right-hand side of your screen every couple of minutes or maybe even every few seconds depending on if it's a typically busy, a more typically busy part of your day, but extremely distracting to have those notifications on throughout your day. And the nice thing about Outlook and other email clients such as Gmail and a few others is that they do allow you to set up some rules. You can make some adjustments to those notifications. So for example, if you want to be sure. If you want to be sure that you receive those notifications from your boss, for example. Well, you can set up a rule that anyone with this particular email address or perhaps anyone who puts on the red high importance a flag or the high importance, an exclamation mark, then those will show up as a notification, but everything else will not show up and not distract you from your day. 

SF: 13:42 And if you think about your mobile device, whether that's an iPad, whether that's your smartphone, many of us are familiar with the little red badges, a little red circle, a usually in the top right-hand corner on your apps. So this is when you're looking at your home screen on your iPad or tablet or on your mobile device, you have a little red badge app icon with a number on it. And this is usually telling you that, hey, you've got this many unread emails. It might be just a few, it might be a few hundred depending on how many unread emails you have at any given time. I strongly encourage people to turn that off as well because listen, we're getting emails 24, seven, we're getting emails all the time. You should not be surprised that you have a handful of unread emails in your inbox. So instead of being tempted to check your email more frequently than you need to see if you can turn off a number of those notifications on your, uh, on your different devices.

MP: 14:45 So how do we turn off? I'm sitting here looking at my phone as we're speaking and I, I've got these little red bubbles all over the place 

MP: 14:52 because every app seems to have a notification as well. And you have me thinking that, yeah, this is kind of strange. It's kind of stressing me out looking at this, it's like, and it's meaningless because I never do anything with it because like right now there are all these buttons with like, I've got under social, I've got 200 and 252 notifications. Like what am I going to take a week off just to look at my notifications? So how do I turn this off? 

SF: 15:18 Exactly. Well, it's a fantastic question and I love that you brought up that example. Whether it's a social media app, whether it's your calendar, I mean almost every app these days has some type of notification. They want to be at the forefront, right? They want you to be in their mind. They want you to click on your ad on their app more than anything else. So if you a, actually, regardless if you're an ios and apple user or an android user under your settings, if you go to your settings, there will be a section under notifications and I believe they're both labeled notifications, both in Ios and in android. And I won't get into all the details of turning this off, but if you go to the notifications area, you will find that you have control over what you see and what you do not see on individual apps or you also usually have the power to turn them all off if you just want to take them all off for every single application. 

SF: 16:14 And again, when it comes to these devices, usually there are multiple notifications. So right now we're talking about the badge app icons. That's, that's usually how there'll be a displayed or referred to a badge app notification. Those are the red ones, but there are other things such as your home screen notifications. Those are often notifications that will pop up even before you've unlocked your device. You know, those are the things that are, that are notifying you in advance. Again, once in a while, those may be helpful and maybe there are one or two apps that you permit that. But for everything else, I strongly encourage you to take the time, take a few moments, just take two minutes out of your day, find the notifications area under your settings app within your, your mobile device and get to learn how you can turn those off. And then going forward, when you do start to install other apps, get into the habit of saying no. 

SF: 17:09 You know, what's one of the first questions that almost every app is asking you? Hey, we'd like to send you some notifications. Is that okay? Get used to saying no. You can always turn it back on if you like. Start with saying no. And if you really enjoy that app, if you think that you would find some value by getting a notification, you can always turn it on. But I suggest that you err on the side of your own focus. Give yourself the advantage. Turn it off at the beginning, and if you'd like to turn it on, you can always go back and adjust it. 

MP: 17:45 I love it. I'm going to do that. I think it's, it's for me that that's a big win because I, I've always tried to like just, I opened them up and I just opened them up so that the notification, a little bubble with the number and it goes away. And so it's useless, it's just one of those things that I do that I don't really think about. But after, after we get off of this conversation, I'm going to do that.

SF: 18:10 And if you do want some more detailed instructions, uh, I would encourage people, you can visit a, actually my website, it's Simpletivity.com I do have a more detailed video to help you turn that off on your ios device. So if you're interested you can find more information there. 

MP: 18:26 Beautiful. And we'll put that link in our, in our show notes as well. Cause I think that'll be helpful because it is with technology and the phones and people do need a little bit of guidance. So a nice video would be very helpful, I think. So what about, you know, on this conversation you've worked with a lot of bookkeepers. What do you, what do you find that they're having the most difficulty with when it comes to their email and working with productivity? Productivity in mind? 

SF: 18:54 Well, I think something that, that bookkeepers can certainly relate to a lot of other professionals can relate to as well, but is being in demand by so many different clients by so many different stakeholders. Right. Every, every bookkeeper has, has multiple clients, different needs. They may have different schedules, different reporting schedules, a different things that they need at different times. And often we sort of succumb to the person who is screaming the loudest or who is perhaps sending us the most emails or the most uh, the most notifications, the most requests throughout the day or throughout the week. And you know, what I've found as I've worked with, with bookkeepers and also with other professionals is that often the client, whether that is an external client or perhaps in some cases it could be someone else within your, within your organization, if you can acknowledge that request or if you can acknowledge that email with an estimated time of delivery, like with an estimated response time or yes I can get that back to you by such and such a date or such and such an hour. 

SF: 20:03 People are often surprised at how that tends to reduce the amount of communication with that particular individual. And I guess it comes back to human nature. I think most of us when we are sort of a shouting or, or, or making these requests and so forth, we really want, what we're really after is not so much that that task is complete in the, uh, in the short term that it's completed right away or it's completed by the end of the day. What we're really seeking is that someone else is taking ownership of that request. Someone else has acknowledged it, someone else has read it, they've understood it, and they've gotten back to me with something that I can, I can sit on, I can, I can take in and say, okay, that that's being handled for right now. I don't need to keep asking about it. I don't need to keep checking in with it. 

SF: 20:52 And so what I often recommend, whether it's via email or if it's in the case of, of again, maybe a larger office and you're dealing with, with people who are making requests or questions at you at your desk is you know, acknowledged that you've understood them. Right? And part of that is maybe repeating what they've just said to you, right. Repeating what their request is, but make a, you know, make a calculated estimate, a time of arrival and estimate a time when you will be able to respond or when you will be able to complete that task. And you might just be surprised as to how satisfied those clients or those individuals are knowing that, hey, you are taking care of it. Someone else has this on their to-do list or someone else has this on their agenda. And hopefully now again, part of it is a part of it, a science part of it is, uh, is, is doing the best, the best estimate or a guesstimate is that you're accurate with your, uh, with your estimate, right? That you can get back at that particular time. But, you know, acknowledge combined with giving them an estimated response time can go a long way. 

MP: 21:56 I think it's great. And you know, it's, I was just at a, an event with a whole bunch of bookkeepers and it never changes. One of the biggest complaints is the lack of time. And so I think what you're talking about really helps people get a relationship with their time. That will change that conversation too. I don't have enough time to, I'm, I'm managing my time better perhaps. 

SF: 22:22 Right, exactly, and instead of letting something sit, I think something that that that also backfires for many of us is that we get that email. It has a lot of information on it. It has a lot of detail, maybe even several questions in it and we say to ourselves, well, I don't have time to reply to that right now, so I'm just going to wait on it. I'm going to reply to that later this afternoon or I'm going to reply to that tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, that individual is just, they're not sitting on their fingers. I'm not just sitting by the computer or sitting by the phone waiting for a response, but it's lingering on their end as well, you know, have they received it? Have they looked at this? Can I get an answer? And often it is worth your time. You're actually going to save yourself some time in the long run. 

SF: 23:08 And probably a lot of worry as well. If you can send just a very quick reply, right? You're acknowledging that you've received it, you've read it, or maybe at the very least you've scanned it and you can say, listen, I'll get back to you with a detailed response tomorrow morning or by x date or in a couple of hours, whatever the case may be and what, how you're saving time. You're saving time in a few different ways, but you're preventing that same individual from emailing you in another hour or later in the day and now perhaps they're a little more upset or a little angrier. So if you do receive those of communication that is a bit lengthier, maybe somewhat angry or upset in tone, see if you can acknowledge it somewhat in the short term, but don't feel that you have to wait, wait for the right time or wait until you have enough time to formulate your full answer. 

MP: 24:02 Hmm. I really liked that. 

MP: 24:10 There are so many new apps in ways that people are communicating. I guess if we're talking about email, we're moving information where we're transferring data to people and words. And so we said we had the facts, we had the telephone, those were the primarily how people in business communicated, you know, snail mail of course. And now we had emails, had a really long run. There's been, I don't even know what, what, what email would be like early, mid-nineties maybe. I'm not a historian on email that I'm thinking mid-nineties would you agree? Or is it, yeah, a little earlier, right? 

SF: 24:46 Yeah. I often regard as you know, 1995 as is often regarded as sort of the birth of the modern internet. Right? There are probably very few people that you or I know that had an email address before 95 so I think you're spot on mid, mid-nineties 

MP: 24:59 Perfect. I, I guessed right. So, so mid 95 people start getting these emails and it was, I mean novel and amazing and they brought all the behaviors that they brought from writing letters and all the old ways of communicating to this new technology, which it's evolved. But that's a, it's a pretty decent amount of time or 95 to put as to 2000 that's 22 years. So emails kind of had this great run of, of 2022 years. If I'm getting my math right here. And, and now they're in the last, let's call it five years, there was Twitter, there was Facebook chat, messenger, there are text messages, there's now this whole thing. Um, I've got slack, I'm trying out slack. What are your thoughts around all these different apps? And I actually have a couple of questions around apps, but what's your take on all of these new ways that people or channels, I guess people are communicating through? 

SF: 25:56 Well, there are a few different things. One, one of the things that I wanted to bring up is that I think a, some of these shorter and more immediate forms of communication such as texting, which again, all of us are texting a lot more frequently than we ever have before. Although chances are you're only texting with the people you know, within your, your close circle, right? The people that you work with directly or your family members. And so forth. Typically, you know, we're not sharing our, our mobile line with uh, with the entire world or, or people have at least some etiquette as in terms of who they're, who they're texting and whom they won't. But I think with, with texting and Twitter, with this immediate form of communication, it has had some backlash in the world of email because many of us are now email as if it's a text. 

SF: 26:45 And I don't just mean by the way we craft those emails by keeping them shorter or writing the entire message in the, in the subject line, but also our expectation of response time. Now if I'm going to text someone, I'm usually only texting that person because I do expect a shorter response time. Right. I'm, I'm, I'm already filtering before I take out my phone as to, you know, the type of question or the types of things I'm going to be saying and what I want to receive, what I want to receive back. But I think it has had somewhat of a negative effect on email because we start to treat email a bit more like a text, a text messaging application. But I'm really glad that you brought up solutions such as slack, which I'm sure there's a number of your listeners who are using themselves. 

SF: 27:35 And if they're not using it, they've probably heard of the name as well and, and are perhaps interested in trying it within their, within their organization. And I love the idea around slack, right, about keeping your communication focused for those who don't know a lot about what the slack application, uh, is. It is primarily a communication tool. And the great thing about slack is that you can have different channels or different themes, different topics so that if you are going to be talking about one particular client or perhaps one particular area of your business, you can keep that on that channel and try and keep that conversation nice and focus. So as you're collaborating with your fellow colleagues or your fellow a, your fellow coworkers, you can sort of keep that conversation nice and focused. And, and I like that because you think of how often you've been in your inbox or you've been in your email and you're searching for that attachment or you're searching for that what, what, what again was, what was it that she said or what was his reply? 

SF: 28:38 And you're sifting through all of this email applications such as Slack can be a really effective tool for, you know, keeping that conversation nice and focused. Having said that, I've, I've heard some people who their experience with slack is that they can get somewhat loose with the number of channels and the number of different topics and then people are not keeping the conversation as focused. And so it just becomes one other area to review one other area to receive messages. So I think, you know, like with any technology, there needs to be some discipline from the users in terms of how it's used and how it can be used effectively. Um, people who may already be a subscriber to simple tivity.com or who may be a subscriber to my simple activity youtube channel. Know that I'm a big fan of Trello, which is more of a project management tool. 

SF: 29:31 But one of the great things about applications like Trello is that you can comment and keep your conversation focused right along with the task or right along with the project. Or maybe you want to manage a customer in an application like Trello or a sauna and that's another really effective tool. If you can keep a conversation within a project management tool, if you can keep it nice and focused, it's so much easier to review what others have said and, and keep that conversation as sort of a, of an ongoing thread rather than mixing it in with everything else in your inbox. 

MP: 30:11 Yeah, those Trello, big fan of Trello. As I mentioned, uh, Slack, I'm brand new to Slack and I actually think it's really confusing. I like some of the features of it. I do really enjoy the text messaging stream with other people without it being on a phone or a device. And the problem, I guess with slack right now is you have to be a slack user for it to actually work. If someone doesn't know how to use it, it's not going to be very, very effective or productive. But what I do like is that focused as you're mentioning, focused communication and focus channel where it's, hey, we're tar, I'm talking to one person, it's about a specific topic and we're just, it's all right there. I can go back and review, grab certain things and that's really, really helpful. But I think people that are new to this would have a better experience with Trello and I would, I would think that and I'm trying to figure out how slack and Trello can work great together, but I love Trello. It's again, really focused way to manage a concept of a project than that, that we're working on and be able to see everybody chiming in on what's happening or making requests of people and checklists. It's a really, really powerful tool. Very simple to, very simple to use, very inexpensive to use, extremely simple and, and very open-ended as well.

SF: 31:26 I find, uh, you know, when I first try to describe someone what Trello is without actually showing them the application, it can sometimes be challenging because it's, it's not a spreadsheet, it's not a word document. It's not as structured in many ways as those types of applications. And it's certainly not something like Microsoft project with different, you know, different charts and all these complicated things that you need to set up in a, in advance. Yeah, Trello can really be as, as simple or as complex as you would like it to be. And I know for many bookkeeping organizations, you know, there's, there are many teams that are as small as, as three to seven individuals. Trello can be an excellent tool. Uh, number one, it's free. There are some additional features if you do wish to subscribe to a, to business class, but about 80% of the features are 100% free. And again, you can set it up in so many different ways, whether you want to manage clients, whether you want to manage projects, you might even want to manage your, your documents or other processes within your organization. Very, very flexible tool. 

MP: 32:34 Yeah, I really think it's important for people to look at other case uses. So I think probably checking out your website and looking at how you're using it would be a great way to get a start on getting their mind wrapped around how to use Trello. But for me, it is a really blank slate and you can use it multiple ways. It's got core functionality, but what the big breakaway for me was when I saw how other people were using it, I was like, wow, that really, I get that. That's simple, very simple. And to, to implement it for us was, was really easy. 

SF: 33:09 Yeah, I've got, I've got a number of video tutorials at Simpletivity.com if you are interested in learning either about Trello as a whole or like you just said, Michael, uh, see some examples and if you're wanting some even more examples, I would encourage you just to Google Trello accounting or Trello bookkeeping, you will come up with some really, really excellent examples from other users in the, uh, in the Trello space. So, so yeah, it can be a great, a great exercise to look at how other people have set up their Trello boards and see if there might be something that would, a would work for, you know.

MP: 33:44 That's great. Well listen, let a, let's make sure everyone has access to your website. If you could, uh, mentioned that and as well if you've, you've got anything in particular that you'd like to share with our listener, that would be great. 

SF: 34:01 Yeah, thanks, Michael. And the best way to reach out to me and find out more information about both my services and a variety of tutorials and blog articles would be on my website. Simpletivity.com that's S, i, m, P, l, e t, I, v, I, t, y.com and I'm sure Michael will include it here in the description of the podcast and release new videos almost every week. Ah, many of them are tutorial based. So if you're interested in learning some simple applications that can help you to be more effective, can help you and your team more productive, you'll be sure to, uh, to want to log in and, and uh, and access my information at Simpletivity.com 

MP: 34:43 That's fantastic. I love it. I think having those web tutorials just give people a real leap forward and what they're trying to do and today has been fantastic. I've gotten a lot of value out of it myself. I'm sure the listener right now is listening, thinking they can't wait to get back to it and, and clean up some of the ways that they're doing their email and, and the conversation of productivity. So thanks again for being on the show. 

SF: 35:09 Well, you're most welcome. Uh, thanks so much for having me and, uh, look forward to the next one. 

MP: 35:14 You betcha. Well, that wraps another episode of The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. To learn more about today's guests and what a productive guest he was, and to get all sorts of valuable free business-building resources, you can go to Thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com. Until next time, goodbye.