Author: Franz Malten Buemann

The average marketer spends almost a third of their time completing repetitive tasks. Marketers already have enough responsibilities — and can’t afford time mismanagement on busy work.
Marketers should spend their time driving company growth and visibility, — and in this post, we’ll give you our best tips and tools to help you minimize your time doing busy work and center your real priorities.

Busy work prevents marketers from focusing on the more important or urgent tasks like working on the next big campaign, strategizing, or content creation. Luckily, we know ways to cut down busy work so marketers can get back to productive projects.
Tips for Reducing Busy Work
1. Determine how you’ll prioritize your workload.
Chances are you have more than one type of deliverable if you’re a marketer. Take the time to analyze and prioritize which parts of your job duties are most important to least as a general framework.
Focus on the most critical or time-bound tasks first, making the busy work seem less tedious when you get to it and giving you designated time to address it.
Pro Tip: Avoid the myth of multitasking. Otherwise, you risk jumping from project to project without finishing notable work, thus extending the time spent on busy work.

2. Create a routine with daily to-do lists.
Making a to-do list is easy, but adhering to one is not. Marketers should carve out time at the beginning of their week to delegate daily tasks. It can promote better time management — something that often gets away from us when consumed by busy work.
You can also easily use many work management tools to create complex to-do lists. For example, one of my favorite tools is Asana.

Whether you prefer a list view or shuffling a digital dashboard, this tool can help marketers stuck on uncompleted busy work to cross them off and stay on track.
Pro Tip: Make your to-do lists actionable. Start your task titles with action words like “Design,” “Create,” or “Submit” to give you an at-a-glance insight into what’s on your plate.
3. Add focus time to reach goals on your calendar.
The average employee spends 28% of their time dealing with unwanted interruptions. Combine that with boring busy work, and your day might seem less promising.
We know you can’t avoid all interruptions all the time, but you can schedule blocks of time for uninterrupted work on your daily projects. For example, if you block out two-hour chunks on your calendar a day where you can work without interruptions, you’ll give yourself a chance to get meaningful work done. And to avoid falling back into busy work during those time frames, including the type of work delegated in the calendar description.
Online meeting scheduler tools also share this functionality, and HubSpot’s Meeting Tool can be an excellent place to start.
Pro Tip: Be reasonable with the time you allocate yourself. You still want team members or other stakeholders to be able to reach you when necessary.
4. Automate manual processes.
According to the Zapier How We Work Report, 74% of workers say they’d prefer to stay in their current position than pursue a new opportunity. That number increases to 90% for those who started using automation in the last 18 months.
Busy work is typically related to outdated systems or processes that could use marketing automation. These tools help you manage and triage marketing tasks without the time needed manually.
A tool that can help marketers to automate work processes is the HubSpot Marketing Automation functionality.

It’s a master tool that can help marketers set up email list autoresponders or build an innovative and complex network of rules designed to target specific users with the correct email, live chat, website experience, and more.
5. Learn when to ask your team for help.
When things get overwhelming, and you have more busy work than you can handle, there’s no shame in turning to your team for a lending hand. Asking for help can foster a collaborative work environment between coworkers and minimize the intimidation of taking on all the responsibility on your own.
Pro Tip: Be mindful of your coworker’s workload when you ask for help. You don’t want to come off as irresponsible to your leadership. And if you are having cyclical issues keeping up with busy work, then it may be in your best interest to talk with your manager about a reduced cadence.
Spend More of Your Day Marketing, Without All the Fuss
While marketers can’t get rid of all the data, reporting, and busy work from the job, we can change how we approach it. We hope you apply our tips to your routine to get you back on track and less overwhelmed with busy work.

Last Updated on January 1, 2023 by Rakesh Gupta With the rising adoption of Salesforce DevOps, scratch orgs are suddenly in the spotlight. This blog will explain what scratch orgs are, why they’re useful, and how you can easily create one using clicks, not code. What Is a Scratch Org?
The post Scratch Orgs for Salesforce Admin appeared first on Automation Champion.

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Imagine waiting for an important email, never receiving it then discovering it in your junk folder months later. That’s pretty frustrating.
The same can happen between a brand and its subscribers – wasting a marketing team’s time and resources.

In this article, learn how to whitelist an email on all major email providers like Gmail and Outlook. If you’re a marketer, discover ways to encourage your subscribers to do so.
Table of Contents

What is a whitelist email?
How to Whitelist an Email in Gmail
How to Whitelist an Email in Outlook
How to Whitelist an Email in Yahoo
How to Whitelist an Email in AOL
How to Get Subscribers to Whitelist Your Email Address
Best Email Practices Beyond Whitelisting

1. Click the gear icon in Gmail and select “See all settings” from the Quick settings menu.

2. Navigate to “Filters and Blocked Addresses” in the top menu.

3. Select “Create a new filter.”
In Gmail, whitelisting an email actually involves creating a filter.

4. Add a specific email or a whole domain in the “From” field.
The “From” field is where you’ll specify what’s getting whitelisted. In Gmail, you can specify either a specific email address (e.g. hello@domain.com), or you can whitelist a whole domain by omitting everything before the at symbol (e.g. @domain.com).
The former will whitelist one specific email address while the latter whitelists anyone who is sending emails from that domain.

5. Click “Create filter.”
From there, you don’t need to input any additional information. Simply click the Create filter button at the bottom of the window (next to the blue Search button).
6. Check “Never send it to Spam” in the checkbox.
Clicking the button brings up a new window. Here’s where you’ll actually specify that what you’re doing is whitelisting. In Gmail, you do this by checking the Never send it to spam box.
Doing so will ensure that emails that meet the criteria you specified never end up in Spam or Trash (unless you do so manually).

7. Click “Create filter.”
Once this information is specified, you click the “Create filter” button again, and this creates the whitelist within Gmail.

1. Click the gear icon in Outlook and select “View all Outlook settings.”

When you select it, a drop-down menu will appear. At the bottom of the drop-down menu, you’ll choose View all Outlook settings.

2. Select “Mail” from the settings menu.

3. Choose “Junk email” from the submenu.
4. Click “Add” under “Safe senders and domains.”

5. Enter the email address that you want whitelisted.
6. Choose “Save.”
This will save your whitelist preferences and ensure that emails that fit the criteria don’t make it to your junk email folder in Outlook.

How to Whitelist an Email in Yahoo

Open Yahoo Mail and log into your account.
Navigate to “Settings” then click “More Settings.”
Select “Filters” and hit “Add” to enter the email you’d like to whitelist.
Name the filter and add the email address.
Select to send all mail to “Inbox.”
Save your settings.

How to Whitelist an Email in AOL

Log in to your AOL account.
Open “Contacts” from the left navigation pane.
Click the “New Contact” icon and add the email address.
Click the “Add Contact” button and you’re set.

How to Get Subscribers to Whitelist Your Email Address
To get on your email subscribers’ whitelists, consider using simple language that frames the extra step as a benefit to the recipient:
“To be sure our emails always make it to your inbox, please add us to your email whitelist.”
Ideally, you’ll include this message in the first email you send new subscribers to improve email deliverability at the onset of a new relationship.
You might use your own flair and brand voice to craft a compelling email message.
Digital marketing agency Yokel Local does this well in their re-engagement campaign aimed at reconnecting with customers who may not be opening their emails:

While the email above is serving a specific function in an email marketing campaign, you can also include a more general whitelist reminder in the footer of all your communications like so:

Keep in mind that not all of your recipients may know what a whitelist is, so you might also want to incorporate steps they need to take. To make the process simple, you can include links to the instructions for the most common web clients like this:
“To be sure our emails always make it to your inbox, please add us as a contact or put us on your whitelist. If you have a Gmail account, follow these steps. Alternatively, if you use Outlook, find the steps here.”
Just be sure that you include instructions for the most popular email providers.

Best Email Practices Beyond Whitelisting
Encouraging your subscribers to whitelist your email is a best practice that can help you improve the deliverability of your email. However, it’s not the only factor that can help you increase deliverability. Here are some additional fail-safes:

Use inbound methods to populate your database rather than buying email lists and sending spam emails.
Segment your email database.
Keep your contact information clean and remove disengaged emails.

All of this is so important in ensuring that your message is heard by your prospects and customers so that you stay top of mind and grow your business.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.