Since then, I’ve gotten to know the founder and CEO, Jared Goralnick who has been approaching the product with a very head down, listening approach. I have used AwayFind for some months now, providing feedback and soliciting advice from Jared on the best ways to use the tool.

Yesterday, they launched with big coverage from LifeHacker.

The idea behind AwayFind is simple. Check email when you can (this is a behavioral modification that AwayFind doesn’t tackle, but many GTD-style discipline/productivity systems do. While it is well and good to only check email twice a day, there is always that urgent one that needs attention right now. AwayFind provides a mechanism for senders to get urgent email through to you via an SMS notification.

I’m proud of Jared for his tenacity and vision for this product. I’ve certainly seen it go from a loose idea to a reality. Congratulations to him and his team for launching, but also doing it completely bootstrapped. Save your valuation, keep your company.

The recommendations I’m offering in this series work for me but they may not work for everyone. There are lots of productivity wizards out there able to recommend different approaches. Find what works for you and run with it.

For me, I have five different email addresses (probably more if I think about it but five that I need to pay attention to). Before embarking on the quest for email ninjahood, I would login to gmail, multiple other webmails, check my Blackberry, etc. all before rolling out of bed in the morning.

Crazy.

Instead, I’ve gone into the settings for email addresses and forward everything to aaron@technosailor.com EXCEPT for Gmail which is on record with probably a dozen different mailing lists. Most of my actionable email goes to aaron@technosailor.com.

This is not the only action I’ve taken but it is first stem. Having all my email in one place allows me to not be going everywhere looking and ensures that everything I need will be in one place.

Next time, I’ll talk about filters and rules, “need-to-know” emails, and leveraging a dedicated email address for your smartphone.

Email quite simply is a problem. Some people are blessed to have little email traffic so they squander that luxury by creating email by sending chain letters or otherwise. I however, have a much bigger, and much more deadly problem.

At last count, across all my various email addresses, I receive about 900 emails every single day. Much of this is junk email (not necessarily spam, but still very Bacn). Another large chunk is mailing lists for WordPress, or Twitter or various different other mailing lists. I read all of it.

When I was at b5media, Jeremy lectured me (not just me) about email management. We instituted various techniques to get our Blackberry usage under control. It was best practice kind of stuff like turning off notification on all emails except ones with certain tags in the subject line. That worked, kind of. It worked for the more disciplined, but I always just figured that I was looking at my email anyway, no need to worry about stupid little additional things.

I left b5media and my email load did drop significantly. For awhile. Then it picked back up again as I was putting quotes together and talking to prospective clients. Much of my communication shifted from email to Twitter direct messages where potential clients often approached me asking if I could help them with a project or something.

My messaging got to be a real problem and my Blackberry had to be cleared regularly. There was just too much mail hitting it and I really didn’t want to see it all on my Blackberry.

Again, I read all my email. Suddenly though, I realized what people like Jared and Jeremy had been telling me for years: I didn’t need to be seeing every single email on my Blackberry. Not even close.

Over the next few articles, I’m going to tell you some of the things I’ve already done in the past two weeks and rules, literally and figuratively, I’ve put into motion in my email life. Everything that could be done has not been done, however the plan is ongoing and, as I’ve loved the results, I expect you probably will too.