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11 Tips for New Digital Nomads

One thing I love about being a professional writer is that I get to do my job from anywhere. I don’t need a massive desk or a richly appointed office. (Although I do surround myself with books in my home office.) I’m a digital nomad.

My mobile office is a Filson briefcase I won about nine years ago where I carry all my essentials. As long as I have wifi and maybe access to an electrical outlet, I can work. As long as I have that, I can work anytime, anywhere.

I’ve been working as a digital nomad for 16 years, even when I had my an office. First in Indianapolis, Indiana and now in Orlando, Florida. I’ve visited hundreds of coffee shops, both corporate and independent, and I’ve made some of them my regular stops. Some of them I couldn’t leave quickly enough.

And while I haven’t achieved a #vanlife level of nomadicity (nomadic-ness?), I still consider myself a digital nomad who can do my job with a 13″ MacBook Pro and a Moleskine notebook.

Here is a list of things I have learned about being a digital nomad and making your city your office.

1. Keep your gear powered up

You would think I wouldn’t have to say this, but I went to a coffee shop with someone who shall remain nameless (but it was my son), and his laptop battery was at 6%. Luckily, we found a plug, and he was able to charge up. When you get home each night, plug everything in for the next day. Monitor your computer’s battery health. I use Coconut Battery to check every month.

Take advantage of free power whenever you can. If you find a coffee shop or restaurant that has plugs near your seat, use the power. Your next stop may see you running on battery for a few hours. Otherwise, plug in as soon as you get home and run any backups on your day’s work.

It also doesn’t hurt to carry an extra power bank. I like the Anker 20,000mAh chargers (affiliate link), but whatever you get, make sure it’s fast-charging. I also like the cordless banks. (There are some with built-in charging cords, but I worry what will happen if the cord breaks.)

2. Have a roster of regular stops

I have several favorite coffee shops, fast food restaurants, and even a pizza place (shout out to Lazy Moon UCF!) where I do my work. I know which tables have plugs nearby, and I plan my work sessions on their traffic patterns and busy-ness. (For example, weekends at Lazy Moon between lunch and dinner are ideal because the place is nearly empty, especially when the University of Central Florida is on break.)

Become a regular if you can, and get to know the staff. Be friendly and chat whenever you buy something. This way, you’ll stand out, and they’ll look out for you as they get to know you better. (Be sure to buy something every 90 minutes to two hours. Don’t just buy a small coffee and camp for eight hours.)

And don’t forget to tip!

3. Participate in the loyalty programs

If you go to the same places over and over, download their loyalty app. You may only get a small discount, like $5 off after 10 purchases, but a little something is better than a big nothing.

Supporting the loyalty program puts money back in your pocket through bonuses and special offers. It may not seem like much, but those freebies are a nice little treat when you’re trying to stretch your dollars. If you don’t like the freebies, then give them to someone else.

4. Shop local as much as possible

You’re a local entrepreneur, so support local businesses whenever you can. If you can go to an indie coffee shop or restaurant whenever you’re out, that’s great. The more you support local businesses, the more they’re going to be around.

5. Meet at indie coffee shops

Once you have your regular shops that you like to visit and you’re getting to know the staff, make sure you have your meetings at those places. Invite as many people as you can to those shops so they see you bringing in new people.

That not only shows your loyalty to the shop, you’re promoting them on your behalf. You’re helping their customer base grow so they can continue to grow and thrive themselves. I have one favorite coffee and donut place in Orlando that sponsors my local 1 Million Cups chapter. As I’ve gotten to know them, and they continue to provide their fresh-made donuts to us every week, I hold most of my networking meetings there. It’s a nice way to say thank you for their generosity.

6. But you can’t beat cheap

Still, if you’re watching your money, you can’t beat a $2 Coke at McDonald’s. You can sit for a couple of hours and work on just a single drink. I don’t recommend doing this every day since it’s not that good for you.

But if you only need a temporary office for a couple of hours, the Golden Arches has you covered, and they’re all over the place. It’s a great place to stop if you need to send a quick email while you’re on a road trip. Just be aware that many McDonalds don’t have electrical outlets, which is why you need to keep your equipment charged.

7. So join Panera’s Sip Club

First, I hate the word “sip” almost as much as I hate “moist.”

BUT I like saving money. And with the Panera Sip Club, I can go to a different Panera every two hours and get coffee, tea, or soft drinks. Or I can sit in one location and get free refills while I’m there.

I sometimes stop in, grab a table, and drink some coffee while I enjoy the free wifi. In fact, I know a guy whose neighborhood Panera is his office, and he’s literally there six or seven hours per day. (I’m not kidding.)

I just joined the Sip Club last week — it costs $15/month or $99/year if you pay annually — and I often go to the Panera near my house. I’ve already spotted several regulars who park at their same tables all day, every day, so it’s a viable remote location.

I know it’s not a local shop, but honestly, the redacted Club pays for itself in five visits. (And if you sign up via the app, you can get the first two months free.)

8. Get a VPN

Public wifi is wildly unsecure. You need to protect yourself, and a VPN is the best way to do it. Several years ago, I bought a lifetime subscription to VPN Unlimited for $69.99. It’s normally $199, but you can get it for $69.99 right now (non-affiliate link).

Note: One thing I have noticed about McDonald’s wifi is that whenever I visit a web page, the page refuses to load the first time, so I have to reload it a couple times. This has happened at several McDonald’s, so I think it’s a McDonald’s thing, not my computer. (Especially since a Speedtest.net test shows that their wifi is plenty fast.)

One day, I saw that when my VPN was on, the pages loaded normally. This makes me think McDonald’s is monitoring everyone’s web traffic to make sure we’re not up to anything sinister or bad, but it causes issues on our web browsers. I can use my VPN to not only protect my personal data but to improve their wifi performance.

9. Work on your local machine, store it in the cloud

The problem with being a digital nomad is that we’re dependent on wifi. When I first joined the Sip Club, I couldn’t get online in any of the stores. I was able to fix it eventually, but it was enough to almost make me quit the club.

Luckily, I was still able to work because I can access all my articles on my laptop before I upload them to clients. Even this article is being written in Apple Pages before I upload it to my blog.

While a lot of people like working on Google Docs or Microsoft 365, that’s difficult if you don’t have wifi. Yes, you can connect to your phone as a wifi hotspot, but it’s slower than dial-up.

On the other hand, by storing everything in the cloud, you can access it if you ever need to use a different computer. On my laptop, I back up all my in-progress documents on iCloud and back everything up to an external hard drive.

Then, I can access files using my iPhone’s Files app and work on them with a Bluetooth keyboard. Or if I know I won’t have my computer, I’ll save a version to Google Docs and use my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard on the road.

10. Learn how to use Google Drive offline

If you prefer Google Drive, there is a way to use it offline. I can’t tell you how because it’s been years since I tried it. (Find out how to do it here.) When you get back online, everything syncs up between your local files and your Google Drive.

It’s a convenient system if you’re focused on keeping costs down, but I’ve been using Apple’s word processor since it was called MacWrite in the 1980s, and I’ve used every version in between. I have no plans on switching now.

But if you’re an offline Google Drive user, let me hear from you in the comments below. What do you like about it? What makes you stick with it?

11. Set up “office hours” with fellow nomads

The one thing I don’t like about being a digital nomad is the loneliness. Sometimes, I miss working in an office because I miss being around people. (Not enough to go back, of course. A bad day working for myself is better than a great day working for someone else.)

Set up a working meeting with other nomads and work together at the same table for a few hours. You won’t get a lot of work done, but you’ll be able to socialize, get to know a few other people, trade ideas and resources, and it can help you find future collaborators to work with.

Take turns visiting each other’s favorite places and sample new restaurants and coffee shops. You never know when you might find a new regular spot for your journeys.

Being a digital nomad is actually a fun way to work. I get to visit different parts of the city and meet new people. I even created a map of all the indie coffee shops around Central Florida so I can decide where I’m going to spend a good part of my day.

Not to mention, if I ever go on a business trip or vacation, I can pack my briefcase and work from any hotel, restaurant, or coffee shop, no matter where I am. And if I ever just wanted to do a quick bit of work, as long as I have a Bluetooth keyboard and my phone, I’m all set.

Do you have any digital nomad tricks of the trade? Share them in the comments.

Photo credit: Erik Deckers

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Develop Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

Several years ago (in the pre-social media days), I was the director of sales and marketing for a software company. My job was to promote our software and to make sure that people, organizations, and state governments bought it.

I was in charge of trade shows, the website, brochures, press releases, and so on, not to mention selling the product all over the United States, as well as other parts of the world. I was making sales calls, traveling, designing, and doing things the sole marketing person in a company does. These were my strengths, and they were the reason I was hired.

Which is why my boss said I should develop my customer support skills.

“Why would I do that?” I asked. “I don’t do customer support.”

“I just think it’s important that you strengthen your customer support skills, since you don’t do it very often.” He added, “I may even have you start learning some coding.”

“So will the customer support team learn how to work trade shows and create brochures?”

“No, why would they do that?” he said, completely seriously.

His rationale was that, since I didn’t have strong customer support skills and I didn’t know how to code, I needed to learn or improve these skills.

I asked him if it wouldn’t be smarter for me to just focus on getting better at marketing or graphic design, and he said he didn’t think that was as important. I needed to be well-rounded and well-versed in everything the company did. (I was also the only one in the entire company that he thought needed to be this well-rounded.)

Your Strengths Make You Money, Not Your Weaknesses

I see a lot of companies make this mistake, whether large or small. They think they and their employees should be jacks- and jills-of-all-trades. Everyone should be a generalist. Everyone should know how to do everything. As a result, no one is great anything, they’re all just mediocre at a lot of things.

(It’s no surprise that these companies are not leaders in their industry.)

The pressure to be a generalist is especially high for entrepreneurs. We often have to do everything because there is no one else.

That pressure wastes more time and kills more businesses because we spend all our time doing the things we’re not good at, which takes us away from our strengths, which is how we make our money.

The dentist who spends four hours a week handling her bookkeeping and staffing requirements is missing four hours of billable time. That’s four hours’ worth of patients she’s missing out on. And if she tries to do her administrative stuff in the evenings and on the weekends, that’s just cutting into personal time, which wrecks her work-life balance, which is the whole reason she started her practice in the first place: to have a fulfilling personal life.

The bookstore owner who spends an hour or two a day handling his inventory and fulfilling ecommerce orders is losing the time spent dealing with face-to-face customers. To solve the problem, he’ll end up hiring someone to help deal with customers when he should really hire someone to fill orders and count inventory.

The consultant who spends three hours each week researching possible new clients instead of actually dealing with client work is losing 156 hours of productivity per year (3 hours x 52 weeks/year = 156 hours). That’s nearly an entire month of time wasted on not creating products or writing reports that help him get paid. In effect, he only worked for 11 months in a year.

In all of these cases, the business owner is spending time doing the things they don’t really need to be doing. Instead, they’re doing things that take time away from the things they should be doing. Their weaknesses are sapping their strengths and they’re losing money.

And instead of trying to solve that problem, they’ll find ways to improve their skills in that weak area. The dentist will invest in bookkeeping software and watch videos on how to use it. The bookstore owner will get better ecommerce software (and learn how to program it), and work to streamline the shipping process. The consultant will invest in business databases or lead gen software and spend more time writing the content needed to bring in new clients.

This is a terrible waste of time, and we need to stop it. This is where it makes sense to hire someone else to do the things we’re not good at.

The dentist can hire a bookkeeper to manage the books for 4 hours a week. The money she spends will be a lot less than the money she makes in seeing patients for 4 hours.

The bookstore owner can hire a college kid to handle the shipping and inventory. Let them streamline the process for you and figure out a way to make it more efficient, then they can teach it to the bookstore owner.

The consultant can hire a virtual assistant to do all the client research for him, even setting his sales appointments.

Don’t spend time or money trying to develop your weak skills. Hire someone whose strengths fill your weak areas so you can focus on getting better at the things that make you money. Try to become one of the best at the thing you do. Get great at your strengths, not slightly better at your weaknesses.

If you’re a writer, take writing classes or read books on writing. If you’re a graphic designer, watch design videos and practice on pet projects. If you’re a dentist, go to conferences and take continuing education classes. If you own a bookstore, focus on your customers and finding new ways to bring people into your store.

For the things you’re weak at, hire a professional to get it done. Hire the graphic designer whose work is continually growing. Hire the writer who creates great work. Work with the consultant who produces great results for their clients.

Trying to strengthen your weaknesses, especially those so completely unrelated to the thing you actually do, is a colossal waste of time and can have a negative effect on the growth of your company. Get better at what you’re good at and you can charge more and work less.

Photo credit: Stocksnap (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Dear Executives, Social Media Does Not Render Your Employees Stupid

Social media does not make people stupid. It does not make them irresponsible, lazy, or unproductive. Social media will make you money, however, if you do it right.

I talk to a lot of business owners and executives who worry that if they start using social media to market their business, their employees’ productivity will plummet.

I’ve had meetings in the last two days with two different business owners. One has embraced Facebook and blogging fully, the other is worried that Facebook will hamper his employees’ ability to get work done.

The first employer urges his employees to do stuff on social media. Almost requires it. His Facebook page gets dozens of visits a day, which is awesome because they sell such a niche product, the customer base for the entire country can be measured in the thousands.

The other employer says — and rightly so — that they have so much administrative work to do around the office, he doesn’t want their Facebook efforts to distract them from getting their admin work done.

The first employer wants to know how he can do more social media marketing. The second employer wants to know the bare minimum he can get by with.

As Doug Karr says, asking what the minimum you can get by with on social media is like asking how slowly you can drive a race car.

Social Media Marketing is Not About Playing

ZOMG! Facebook lets me play with kittehs!!

We as employers trust our employees. We trust them to answer the phones and be pleasant to everyone who calls in. We trust them to make travel to other states and make sales calls and presentations. We trust them to take payments from customers and put our money in the bank. We trust them to buy products from other companies. And we even trust them to use computers without standing over them, watching them type every email.

So what is it about social media that scares the bejeezus out of every employer and makes them think that the second they allow Facebook onto their computers, their entire workforce is going to turn into a bunch of 13-year-old girls jacked up on Red Bull and the most recent Justin Bieber sighting?

If you trust these people enough to do business in your name, collect and spend your money, and talk to your customers, then you need to trust them enough to continue to do these things while Facebook is unblocked on their computers.

If you don’t trust them, that’s your fault. If you don’t trust your employees to not screw around, you’re the problem, not Facebook. You hired the wrong people, and that’s a management issue.

Hire people who will get their work done, and make your expectations for social media usage clear from the outset. These are people who can help your company be more profitable, so why not take advantage of that?

Social Media Marketing is About Making Money

The whole reason for a business to be on social media is to make money. Period. It’s not to play Farmville on Facebook. It’s not to pin the latest novelty cake on Pinterest. It’s not to take photos of a rusted out piece of farm equipment on Instagram. It’s to find people who would be interested in buying your products or services.

Every business owner and manager is always looking for a way to make more money and be more profitable. The problem is, many of them are hampered by doing the things that don’t make them money. Doing payroll. Filing claims. Managing inventory. Filling and shipping product orders.

The problem is, payroll, paperwork, inventory, and shipping don’t make you money. Marketing makes you money. Finding new customers makes your money. If you’re a business owner, and you’re spending your valuable time doing payroll, paperwork, inventory, and shipping, instead of generating revenue, outsource them.

Hire a bookkeeping firm to manage payroll. Hire a virtual assistant to file your claims. Hire a $10 hour college student to count inventory and stick orders in boxes. The less of this non-revenue generating work you can do, the better.

Spend the newly found time pursuing new customers. Spend it on Facebook, Twitter, or writing your blog. It doesn’t take long to bring in a couple choice clients to recover the costs of having a part-time employee handle the grunt work that’s actually losing you money. Have them handle more of your non-revenue workload, and find a couple more. You can grow just by having someone else do the heavy lifting for you.

But it starts with letting go of the fear that your employees are going to be struck stupid the second you allow Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn on your company computers.

Photo credit: bjornlifoto (Flickr)

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Reaching Inbox Zero in Five Simple Steps

Inbox Zero. It’s the holy grail of anyone who uses email as a primary form of communication. My inbox is empty right now. Completely empty. It took months to get there, mostly because I kept letting it get filled up again with complete crap. It will probably get full again, but my goal is to keep it below 10 as much as possible.

If you’re like me, you treat your inbox like a to do list. If it’s in there, it’s an actionable item, and you’ll leave it there until you can cross it off your list. (Because otherwise if you delete or archive the email, you’ll forget to do it.) Then, important emails get buried and you miss out on them.

Here are the things I’ve done over the past few weeks to get to a beautifully empty inbox.

This is the most beautiful site these eyes have ever seen.

(Note: I use Gmail and all the Google properties, including Google Calendar and Google Tasks. This has also helped keep me organized because everything is interrelated. Some of this information is based on what I can do with Gmail.)

1) Delete the crap and dreck.

Before you do anything else, go through all your email newsletters, semi-interesting advertisements, and other pieces of information you thought you’d find a few extra minutes to read. If you have’t read it by now, you’re not going to find the time. If it’s an ad, a solicitation, or a special offer you signed up for, get rid of it. This is like junk mail. You wouldn’t keep piles of junk mail and newspapers in your house “just in case,” so do the same for your inbox.

2) Create a label or folder and archive emails.

If you have important emails that you need to save about a certain project, client, or topic, create a folder, and put those emails in that folder. If you use Gmail, create a filter to apply a specific label for that project, client, or topic, and then archive it. When you need to recall it, click on that label, and all those emails will appear. If you store everything in folders, then search through that particular folder.

3) Delete or archive anything older than 2 months.

This is especially important if you’re the kind of person who saves all your emails in your inbox. I’ve known people who have more than five thousand emails in their inbox. Not their entire email folder. Their inbox. There is no reason you have to keep these handy. They’re not doing you any good, because if you’re treating your inbox like a to do list, those action items have lo-o-o-o-ng since expired. Just dump any emails you don’t need, and archive the ones you might.

4) Add actionable items to a to do list.

Copy the important information into the notes. I use Google Tasks, and there is a place for notes with each task. I can also type in specific keywords, the date, and the people involved, so I can search for that particular email later. And by archiving — Gmail has a great searchable archive that makes finding old emails a breeze — I get those things out of my inbox. Similarly, if it’s information I need to keep, I’ll copy and paste it into my Evernote so I can find it later.

If you’ve got stuff you need to take care of in the next day or two, leave those items out for now.

5) Do important actionable items right away.

By this point, you should only have a few emails left — things you have to get to right away, deadlines to meet, answers to send, appointments to schedule. I try to work in 15 minute blocks and plow through as many emails as I can in this fashion. If someone needs a reply, I send it. If I have to read something, I do it fast. Plow through all the necessary items as fast as you can, even if it means scheduling an appointment with yourself to keep that time blocked.

Important: Don’t just file actionable emails into a To Do file. That may be a real Inbox Zero trick, but to my mind, it’s cheating. You don’t just file stuff away to have an empty inbox. You actually do the things you’re getting the emails for. If you can’t do them, leave them in the inbox until you can. But if you feel the burning desire to hit Inbox Zero, then pull the emails into your To Do list, or copy and paste the information into a document on your desktop. But filing for later is not the best option.

To maintain Inbox Zero, I jealously guard my inbox from all intruders, and I treat each one like an incoming task. Here are the ways I get rid of those emails to keep them from piling up again:

  1. Skim and delete newsletters. Unsubscribe from any that don’t catch my interest. If I’ve received it five times and never opened it, I unsubscribe from it.
  2. Respond to easy questions immediately, and archive the emails. If a response is coming back, there’s no reason to keep the email in my inbox. It will pop back in soon enough when the other person replies.
  3. Schedule responses for appropriate times. If you have Outlook, you’ve always been able to do this. I just started using Gmail on Chrome recently, and I got the Boomerang extension, which allows me to schedule replies and responses. If I work ahead on an answer to a client or colleague but they don’t need the answer right away, I schedule my reply for a future delivery, and then archive the email.
  4. Filter particular emails like newsletters I want to keep, and have them delivered straight to a particular folder, bypassing the inbox. Then I can read them when I have the time, but they won’t sit in my inbox.
  5. Ruthlessly delete unnecessary emails. Be a jerk about it. If something doesn’t grab my interest right that second, dump it. I don’t keep it, hoping it will be relevant in a few days. If I really want to keep something, I’ll put it in a special folder called “to do eventually.” I created that folder six months ago, in the hopes that I would find time to go back to those “maybe I oughta” emails, and haven’t pulled anything out of it since. I haven’t missed anything since then either.
  6. Use Boomerang to have emails pop back into my inbox. If I don’t want to add something to my to do list, Boomerang can help. I can archive or hide a message and have it come back to my inbox at a certain time. When it shows up, I’ll deal with it at that moment. This is different from filing stuff into a To Do folder, mostly because I say it is. No other reason.

So that’s what I’ve done to achieve Inbox Zero, and what I’ve been doing to keep it clutter free. What do you do? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations? What about you real Inbox Zero practitioners? What are some of the best ways you’ve found to work clutter free?

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Five Tips to Being Productive While You’re on the Road

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, with speaking gigs and client meetings, and I’m finding it harder to be productive, especially when these are all day trips, and the time I would normally spend in a hotel or a coffee shop is instead spent driving to or from my events. I’m also a regular entre-commuter, carrying my office in my backpack and working wherever I can find a coffee shop with free wifi.

While days like this mean a lot of evening, night, and weekend work (and a lot less sleep), there are some ways I have found I can still be productive while I’m out and about.

  • Get someone else to drive. When Paul and I drive anywhere, we take turns driving, so the other can get some work done. Get a friend or colleague to drive you to an appointment, or once you’re a big shot making a few thousand bucks for a speech, hire a driver. Do some work while the other person drives, and don’t be afraid to say “I can’t talk right now, I have to get this done.”
  • Keep projects “in the cloud” on your laptop. When we’re driving, I can tether my mobile phone to my laptop and get some very slow, basic wifi. This means that loading websites, answering emails, and writing blog posts is painful and I just give up. Instead, I write email responses and blog posts on my laptop and upload them when I get to a coffee shop or my destination. Since our writers turn in their submissions via Google Docs, I download them before I ever leave, make the changes, and upload them when we get to our next stop.
    • Paul's working on our new monthly email newsletter.
  • Plan for work breaks. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Columbus, Indiana, on the way back from giving a talk in Lexington, KY, to write this post, because we had some client work to take care of. Yes, we could just keep going, but we’re about to head north into Indianapolis’ rush hour traffic, and by delaying now, we’ll miss the bulk of the 5:00 rush. It also lets us get some work done so we don’t have to deal with it when we get home. Why slog through rush hour traffic only to do some more work when we just want to relax? Normally, we try to plan a 30 minute break in our longer trips so we can stop off and handle any surprise client requests — publishing a blog post, sending a Facebook message, responding to a tweet — that come in while we’re in the car.
  • Make phone calls instead of emails. My efficiency-expert friends say to stay off the phone and send emails, because I can write a note in two minutes, but a phone call can take 10. But when I’m driving, I’ve got 2 – 3 hours before I get to my location, so why not kill some time on the phone? I get to make that personal touch with people I do business with, and I avoid the 10-email-exchange that we try to do to get a task out of our inbox and into the other person’s. In some cases, a phone call even lets us finish a project completely.
  • Plug your laptop in whenever possible. I’m watching my laptop slowly drain its battery to below 50%, and I remember that I didn’t plug in earlier when I had the chance. Whenever you stop for a quick break (#3), your time and productivity may be limited by the fact that your battery wasn’t charged previously. This also cuts your productivity in the car — if your battery dies, you and your companion are forced to talk about your feelings any topic that randomly comes to mind. One way to avoid this is to get a DC converter for your car, like the truckers use. Get a decent one at your local hardware store or a truck stop, and plug it into your car’s cigarette lighter, then plug your laptop into it. Some really good ones even have a USB charger so you can charge your mobile phone with your USB cable.

What are your tips? How do you keep productive while you’re in the car? Leave a comment and share your wisdom.

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Gmail is the New Black: Why You Should be Using Gmail Right Now

Do you use Gmail or some other web-based program, or are you still accessing email strictly on your computer, cursing Outlook, and praying for the sweet, sweet release that death a hard drive crash will bring? Do you have a backup of your address book and necessary emails, should that blessed day ever come?

When I give a social media talk, I tell everyone to use Gmail for basic contact management. It has saved my bacon more than once, and I’ve become such a raving fan that I use it as my only email interface. I even forward my work email and other addresses into Gmail, so I have one window, one set of contacts, and the cleanest, least buggy interface I’ve ever had the joys of using. I can send email from any of my addresses, but the interface is all Gmail.

The joys of Gmail

If you’re not using Gmail yet, here are a few reasons why you need to:

  • Social network building Any social network you join is going to have a way to import your address book into the network so you can see if your friends are on there. Gmail is the easiest one to bring in. Some networks don’t even import web-mail programs like Hotmail. Others are a little more forgiving and will let you import Apple Mail, Outlook and Outlook Express, and comma-delimited CSV files.
  • Offsite storage of your contact list Let’s say that your work computer crashes, and you lose everything. Or you are, um, no longer allowed to. . . access your work computer due to a new arrangement you have with your now-former employer, and you need to let your friends and colleagues in other companies know about your new work situation. Having a copy of your address book in your control will make this a lot easier. You can even sync Gmail with Outlook, so any time you change or add a record, that is reflected in the other. Warning: some solutions will split up multi-email records, and then sync all those brand new records into Gmail. I had that happen twice, after I spent hours cleaning them up.
  • Emergency access If you ever need to reach people over the weekend or in the evening, but your computer is at work, you can still do so. This is especially important for people in crisis communication whose organizations are still planted firmly in 1997. If you’re counting on your email server and your email list to be available if you need to do a press release or media alert, you’re totally hosed if that thing ever crashes because of a large-scale disaster. When I was in crisis communication, we had to come up with some plan to work around just that contingency. And if you’re in the middle of an emergency, and you can’t get access to your email server, you need another solution. There are so many workarounds to getting online, as long as you can get there, you can communicate. But if you’re depending on one computer’s data, forget it.
  • Enterprise email You can even use Gmail for business. For $50 per user per year, you can get 25 MB of storage per user, plus it syncs with Outlook and Blackberry. (For the record, I can also sync my personal email with my HTC Droid.) You keep your corporate identity and addresses, but you have the security and ease of use of Google’s email, calendar, and Docs.

What about you? Why do you use Gmail (or your favorite web-mail application)? Why should people switch to web-mail from computer mail? Or, why shouldn’t they?