If you haven’t read Tim Ferriss 4 Hour Workweek yet, do it.

It’s probably one of the most important books of the decade. No kidding. It’s all about outsourcing your life so you can spend more time IN your life, enjoying it!

And it’s a major reason I’m in the process of totally restructuring MY business.

If you want to know who to outsrouce some of this stuff to, try GetFriday.com

Hey Guys,

It’s been a while since my last post.  We had company come to visit us in our new home in Nova Scotia.

That’s one of the things I really treasure about the internet lifestyle.  You can cut out when you want to.  Life is so much more than money.

We had such a great time

What I want to share with you today is about action focussed to do lists.

Now I use OPRIUS to take care of my to-do lists.  It’s an online software for managing a online business, and it’s designed for Network Marketers specifically.  (Or anybody in sales for that matter.)

In the task manager section, I have learned to start all of my to-do’s with a CAPITALIZED VERB.

This forces me to think about what the next action I need to take is, and to make it clear.  Anytime you can save actual thinking for real work just makes more sense.

For example:

• CALL John Hammond
• BUY the 3 Percent Method
• WRITE article on the universal laws
• REVIEW design for our new physical CD 

Try it out for yourself and let me know how much more you can get done in a short time period… 

OK, the 2 best things about GMAIL are the spam filter and the idea of centralization.

You see, to be really productive, you want to eliminate as many inboxes as possible. And the best way to do that is to run ALL your email accounts from 1 central location. Now I knew this before, but was terrified of adding all of my older email address and routing everything to 1 central box. (Don't your first email accounts get lots of spam too?)

But GMAILs spam filter is better than anything I've used. I've used SpamAssassin, SpamInspector, SpamBully for Outlook Express. And SPAM was always still a problem.

But it's not a problem anymore. And I actually get less emails to my central email than I used to get to any single email account.

Now you may be wondering, how do I set up GMAIL to take over all my email addresses.

Here's the secret:

Just go under the accounts tab under Settings at the top right hand side of the page:

And you can add in 5 accounts.  (And by the way, the easy way to get more is simply to forward them to one of the accounts in your main GMAIL account.)

The fact is by simplifying your email into 1 central location to check, you save time, and the one resource that can be even more precious to an entrepreneur than time: focus. 

Email is the biggest problem nobody talks about.

Let's face it… You get more email than you want to receive. So does everybody else.

There are some simple tactics you can do to get email under control and in this series of blog posts, I'll explain some of the tactics I use to deal with email. 

But as one of my goals was to make my business more "portable." Here are my main reasons:

1. It's better online.
2. It's a pain to access email via a laptop on vacation. I never use my laptop on vacation and when I do it's stressful because I'd rather be outside not fiddling with the wireless connection or dial-up.
3. To avoid the unnecessary prep of loading my email on the laptop in the middle of last-minute packing, and syncing everything when I get home.
4. No worries (about email at least) if the computer crashes.
5. No worries if I decide to get a new computer.
6. You can access it on a PDA or  Blackberry.
7. Centralization.

Now I knew I was heading into #5, and then 2 weeks after I got my new computer it died. I mean the thing would not even turn on at all!

But the most important reason is the last one. Centralization.

One of the trick in life is to have as few different emails to check. Now I decided to move to Gmail. And even though I did not understand why there were no folders (get to that in a minute) and I didn't love the interface. But I jumped.

Gmail is really cool. And you may not know that, but you can re-route 5 other email addresses into 1 gmail account. Now instead of logging into 2 or 3 gmail accounts throughout the week, you can have everything come into 1 place.

The thing I was scared about was spam. Well Gmail has the BEST spam filter. It's not even a problem in my life anymore. And that makes me really happy !

But the importance of centralization is time.

Multi-tasking is myth. You can only do one thing at once. And if you are doing 2 or more things, you can't be doing anything meaningful in terms of your business or productivity.

It's all those little things that create trouble in your business. Even just keeping track of all the email accounts that may exist.

If fact, I'll explain how I personally set up my Gmail account in the next post, and some secrets you may not know about Gmail.