In a nutshell, this is what I use it for. With Xobni I can quickly search through my thousands of emails extremely fast to find conversations I’ve had with friends and clients. Also, when I read an email, the software automatically searches through Facebook and LinkedIn to find out if the name or email address matches any accounts on those sites. It makes sorting emails and connecting with people a breeze.

I believe it also can be used with regular Gmail and some other email providers.

You can download it at www.xobni.com. Enjoy!

Everything is connected to email these days. Your friends send you email, your business contacts, your Facebook updates, appointment reminders, the list is seemingly endless especially if you’re constantly subscribing to newsletters with great information like I do almost on a daily basis. 

How do you know if email is taking over your life? If you’ve ever caught yourself sitting at your desk doing busy-work and jumping right to your email as soon as an email comes through, you’re probably in danger. If you quickly interrupt your creative process to check who just sent you a message, you’ve got a habit to break. If you’ve ever reached the end of the day and you feel like all you did was check your email all day, it’s time to get back in control of your time.

Make sure that you close your email, turn off your iPhone, Blackberry, or whatever you use, and make sure you have several periods of uninterrupted work throughout the day. The email will be there when you’re ready to check it. It’s not going anywhere. 

It’s your responsibility to make sure that you are spending your time doing the things that make money for your business. It’s essential that where you spend the majority of your time is directly related to generating revenue without interruption. For me personally, during those uninterrupted time periods, I go into “the zone” and I am extremely productive. I’ll slam out the entire day’s work in an hour or two sometimes. However, all that goes to pot if you break your concentration to check a mystery email that just came through and happens to be a piece of junk mail for new Hello Kitty screensavers or something. 

Get in contol of your email using an email management software as I mentioned in my previous post, but don’t let your email get in control of you. Peace.

How? With some great software you probably already have on your computer or that you can get for free. Most computers have Microsoft Outlook pre-installed so all you have to do is plug in your information and use it. One of the features of Outlook is email management. If you don’t have Outlook or prefer to use something else, a free piece of software called Thunderbird 2 is a popular solution. Both are great solutions to email organization. 

What does this software do exactly? It check and downloads emails from all of your email accounts to your computer either automatically every “x” minutes or at the click of one button. With the click of a button you’ll know if you’ve received emails to any of those accounts in about 20 seconds or less. And, what’s even greater about the software is that you can reply to all the emails using the same piece of software!

No more opening browser window after browser window to check all of your email accounts and reply to them. 

You can also set up the software to run while you do your work, and when an email comes in from any of your accounts, the software will notify you either with a little pop-up window or an audible alert. It’s incredibly efficient.  

So, stop wasting your valuable time logging in and logging out managing multiple email accounts and get your computer to do it for you. Here’s where you can download Thunderbird 2 http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/