Nov 13th, 2008
Frugal With Time and Money Via Email
My boss is somewhat of a technophobe. While she is willing to send out email, a lot of things that would be best done that way–say, forwarding a list of community resources–doesn’t get done that way. Instead, the document gets printed and put in the mailbox of everyone on staff.
One of my friends recently moved states and lost his email address because he changed providers. He kicked himself over it for awhile but didn’t think he had much of a choice; in the meantime, another friend keeps an AOL account simply because he doesn’t want to lose the email address he’s used for well over a decade.
These are a couple examples of how email can cost you both time and money.
Here are some ideas to reverse these issues and make email a productivity booster–
Turn Phone Calls Into Email: In many ways one of the best things you can do with phone calls. Phone calls are not only a gigantic time sink, they require both people to be doing the communicating at the same time–it requires the coincidence that both people are there, on the phone. Email can allow one person to be writing while the other is doing anything–they can be at the computer or not. Granted, there are many things that are more important to do via phone than email, but think about how many things can be done more than adequately this way, including having the huge advantage of a written record.
Think Paperless: Anything that can be sent via email, faxed, or passed out in printed form really needs to be emailed. It’s a waste of a tree to do something else!
Get an Email Address for Forever: Remember my AOL friend above? You get the picture. You can get an email address with a gigantic company you think will be there forever for free (Yahoo! and Google come to mind), you can register your own domain, or you can have someone with their own domain you have a relationship with set up an account for you, but this way you can eliminate the “I can’t kill AOL” syndrome.
Get the Power of Google Behind You: The enemy of email, is, of course, Spam. I recommend folks use Google as their email host because they have great Spam filtering–and they’re free. You could easily be someusername@google.com, or you can do as I do and have my email forwarded by another service to Google. Either way, their service is free and the filtering is great.
Email can be a way to spend less time and energy on tasks, or it can be an anchor that ties you to a monthly expense that you no longer want, but feel like you need. Take some time to work on your email habits and functions and make a real difference in your productivity!
I experienced a similar problem. When I bought my iPhone, I first checked with “Got Reception?” (Gotreception.com) It’s a great resource for finding out where reception problems are most likely to occur BEFORE you lock yourself with a specific carrier.
GMail is a wonderful service and I use it to aggregate several of my email accounts, but the fact that it doesn’t cost any money doesn’t mean it’s free. Perhaps it is too late to do anything about the gigantic power that is Google, but it’s important to be aware that every email sent and received is being mined for data about you. Whether that is good, bad, or neither is up to each of us, I suppose, but it is still something. For people like me who put as much value on privacy as on money, it’s something to consider.