Better Email = Better Productivity

In this day and age, it is quite clear that email is an indispensible part of everyone’s life. For some people (especially those in senior management roles), having to clear hundreds of emails in a day is fairly routine work. Hence it is important to have a very good email workflow or email interface.

There are two main ways people deal with their email, offline (via email clients like Outlook, Entourage, Mail, Thunderbird etc) and online (via web-based email clients like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail). The real advantage of offline mail is (obviously) that you can deal with it offline, whenever you need it.But the problem with this is that downloading email takes a while, your email client can hang when it encounters large email attachments, and most importantly, it takes up a huge portion of  your hard drive. For a somewhat more detailed discussion, refer to this.

Here, i am just going to talk about what i use predominantly for my emails, which is Gmail. If you haven’t used gmail before, i suggest you try it now. Even if your work email is tied/locked into proprietary stuff like Exchange and Lotus Notes, you should still get a gmail account and start migrating your emails to it. For help on this, refer to gmail help discussions.

There are many things to like about Gmail – huge storage space (although Yahoo has unlimited storage), good search capabilities (its Google!), other integrated features like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Chat etc (although hotmail is coming up with these as well), good spam filters (best one so far). But there are two things that stand out: one is the way it deals with the many email conversations that you have – it threads them together, saving you time and precious memory space in remembering what went on in previous emails! The other is the way it allows you to organise your emails – via tags/labels instead of the usual hierarchical folders method. This is mighty useful when a email falls into a few categories and you dont have to copy and paste into many folders.

Of course with any new email client, you will have to learn how to fully utilize all its nifty features, so refer to some videos on youtube on how to make use of some of the features i’ve talked about, Steve Rubel’s blog on how to make gmail your gateway to the web, and finally the official gmail blog .