6 Email Hacks for Efficient Functional Medicine Practices with Matt Dippl

If you answer your emails quickly, this is a sign for your clients and patients that you are really on top of your game, and that you care about them. If people have to wait a long time for your replies, this will not make a good impression. So and this is one of the major things that I've seen working with the first cohort of coachees in the early adopter programme that email is a big challenge for them. Here are some hacks for you how to get better with that.

Point number one: make it a focus to get on top of your email skill set. Now, if you get more and more inquiries, and you name spreads, and people want to work with you, you have to really be able to answer email quickly. So how do you do that?

Hack number two: strive to get towards inbox zero on a daily level. Inbox zero means that your email inbox is empty, and you worked through all of your emails. When you answer your most important emails during the day, and you see that your email inbox is empty, you will feel great. This is a great benefit of Inbox Zero, you will feel confident and happy that you've done good work.

Hack number three: use an email platform that makes email easy for you. I personally use Google Mail. I don't want to use Apple Mail. It's too clunky for me, it's unreliable, and from my own experience I don't like to use Microsoft Office either for email. I'm a big fan of Google Mail, I have a lot of functionalities in there that make my email game really efficient.

Hack number four: combine an email desktop client with mobile access. I can access my email via the browser. I can access email by a desktop client, and I can access my email via my iPhone. So wherever I am, I can quickly respond to email during the day. But I advise to only do email outside of your peak productivity times. So I have deep work sessions in which I don't answer email. And then I have very specific times during the day before lunchtime and in the afternoons when I do my email, and of course sometimes I have a look if there's something urgent then I will reply to it as well doing other times.

Hack number five set up filters for your messages to protect your inbox. Every email programme will have the ability for you to filter messages so you can filter according to email messages, or you can filter according to subject topics. Two examples here would be for example, if you have a lot of invoices to deal with that come through, you can filter for the topic of "invoices2 in your subject headline. And then I have a specific folder for invoices so I can get on top of them. Or if you have a coaching programme, you can filter the messages from your clients with a specific name and put them into a specific folder like "coaching clients".

So with this, we already come to Hack number six: set up folders and subfolders for operational clarity so you can have a folder in which you put all the emails from your coaching clients, you can have a folder for all the different office tasks that you do. For example, I work together with my wife in the team and the she has her folders and subfolders. So this is how you create operational clarity to be really efficient with your email.

So please master your email skills before you functional medicine practice is scaling up and strive to Inbox Zero daily. If you don't have a good email game, when you get more inquiries, and patients, you will be in trouble. So if you need help with that, please make sure to join my email newsletter. Very soon I will actually launch a course on the topic of email efficiency in a functional medicine practice.

One of the best ways to continually upskill yourself is to surround yourself with other entrepreneurs on the same journey. In case you'd like to be part of regular monthly trainings on topics around efficiency and productivity for functional medicine providers then please check out the fxmed Accelerate Community HERE.