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.