Tuesday Time-Wasting Tip-Off #4: How Aggregated E-Mail Can Cut Down On Mental Clutter

Multiple e-mail systems, each requiring their own login details, are a huge productivity killer.

Checking on a regular basis for new messages from co-workers, clients and contractors sucks even more time.

The ability to aggregate all of your e-mail in one location can save a huge amount of time over the course of a week or month.

Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail or Yahoo! Mail; any of these systems will let you gather up several e-mail accounts and view them in a single location.

I run Microsoft Outlook as my main e-mail client, and at various times I have considered switching over to other clients, but I have yet to find one I really can get on with.

I am not a big fan of Outlook, but it works for my purposes and lets me reasonably easily synchronize my e-mail across multiple machines such as my laptops, workstations and phone.

Outlook can pull in e-mail from multiple POP3 and IMAP e-mail systems at the click of a button, and various plug-ins abound for it to download Yahoo!, AOL and MSN e-mail too along with several other browser based e-mail systems.

The free Yahoo! e-mail account you have does not provide direct POP3 access for applications such as Microsoft Outlook but if you don’t feel like paying a yearly subscription, a plug-in for Outlook such as YPOPS! Can solve the problem.

If a desktop based solution such as Outlook or [Mozilla open source e-mail client] is not to your taste, try using Google to handle all of you e-mail accounts. Gmail is a very capable web browser based application, though it lacks many features and much of the flexibility of dedicated desktop applications. Though if [Google Mail] works for your needs, I strongly suggest that you use it.

There are also other browser based e-mail systems available, such as those supplied by Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others. My suggestion is to try two or three of them out for a month before settling on a solution, as whatever you pick, it will provide a certain amount of lock-in to the system by erecting exit barriers. The barriers will come most strongly when you attempt to move all of your archived e-mail, accounts and contacts off to a new system, if the website even provides that facility. Many do not and you will be stuck with all of your previous e-mails and contacts on one system, and all of your newly received and created data on another, defeating the real purpose of aggregating your e-mail accounts.

For me the idea of storing my e-mail permanently on a server out of my control, and requiring an internet connection to access historic e-mail is not one I wish to pursue. My communication channels and my specifically my business communication is too important to leave in the hands of another corporate entity that may not be here tomorrow, or just shrugs their shoulders when they lose your data and merely point at their data retention and backup policy.

I have been bitten by the problem of storing data on a computer that is not under my direct control so many times in the past that I do not even allow it to happen anymore. You may not value your e-mail all that much right now, but how disruptive would it be to your life or business if someone else lost your data?

Gathering your similar data up and viewing it through a single application or location, rather than running errands between multiple websites and finally flipping over to a desktop application to complete the task will save you precious time and mental bandwidth over the course of your business day without fundamentally altering how people communicate with you.