During a recent Instagram Live session, I had the pleasure of chatting with Sarah Blake of Earthology.ie recently – read more. One of the topics we discussed was the #sustainability of #digitalbusinesses and it got a lot of interest from our audience, so I am going to highlight 3 actions you should take to make your digital business more sustainable and how a virtual assistant can support you in this path in your virtual business.
- As we increasingly rely on digital storage, it’s important to consider the environmental impact. Data transfer generates significant amounts of heat, requiring much energy to keep the servers cool. In fact, #datastorage is expected to overcome aviation in terms of emissions. It’s vital that we all do our part by being mindful of our inboxes and storage practices. According to research conducted by Project Drawdown in the US, spam emails contribute significantly to #carbonemissions, with a carbon footprint equivalent to around 330 million cars on the road. Do you receive emails or newsletters that don’t interest you? In these instances, it’s best to unsubscribe rather than just delete the email. When you delete an email, the energy has already been used to transmit it, but by unsubscribing, you prevent further unwanted emails from coming in. To put it simply, email is like a signal that goes up to the cloud and comes back down. Read “How bad are bananas” by Mike Berners – Lee to learn more about this topic
- The key about digital traffic is cutting down. Have you heard of OVO Capper? This clever tool developed by UK-based energy company OVO Energy, sits right in your Chrome browser and helps you streamline your emails. It prompts you with a message asking if you really need to send an email consisting of just four words or less. It’s a terrific way to avoid unnecessary messages like “Thanks a million” or “LOL” that don’t really require a response – read more. Similarly, we can avoid automatically saving everything on our phones to the cloud and instead opt to switch off automatic storage.
- The last tip is a website to check your website’s carbon footprint. Have you heard of Website Carbon? It’s a website, websitecarbon.com, where you can measure your website’s #carbonfootprint. This tool checks if your hosting provider is eco-friendly and compares your website’s carbon emissions to a benchmark of similar websites. Discover if your website is environmentally friendly by visiting Website Carbon today!
If you’re looking to take steps to make your business eco-friendlier, but don’t have the time to manage it all, consider outsourcing to an online executive assistant. This way, you can focus on the creative side of your business while we take care of the virtual business process support.
Drop me an email, and I’ll contact you with all the necessary information and steps to help you get started on the road to sustainability.