More and more research is showing that most humans are simply not built for multitasking. I’m especially poor at it, a problem that plagued me back in the dark days when I worked customer service for a cell phone company.  Nowadays, I generally don’t have to try to talk and type at the same time, but I still have to battle with distractions, especially since I work online from home.

Email is both my primary means of communication and my biggest distraction aside from Facebook. Oooh, look, this store I like is having a sale! Ooh, look, someone posted a new picture on Facebook! You get the idea… I use filters and Gtriage to sort my mail and move the most important stuff to the top of my Gmail inbox, but temptation lurks below and is easily accessible with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Awayfind is a cool app that has a unique solution to this problem…simply close your inbox down completely and let only the most important emails find you. Basically, the service lets you filter your messages by sender, subject or keyword and then lets you decide what to do with them: You can set up an autoresponder, have AwayFind notify you via text message, have AwayFind call you and read you the message, or receive notifications via Twitter or IM. If you work on a team, you can also delegate the messages to other team members to deal with.

If you use Firefox, there’s also a browser extension that lets you set up filters and tell AwayFind how to respond in just a couple of clicks, right from your email inbox. Nice!

I can see using this with Toodledo to put responding to email messages on my to-do list-just set them to be forwarded to my Toodledo email address automatically.

Worried about missing something important? AwayFind also lets you set up an emergency contact form on your AutoResponder message, so if someone is emailing you with something urgent and it isn’t being forwarded, they can fill out the contact form and AwayFind will notify you to contact them immediately.

AwayFind is super-handy and the filters are easy to set up. The only problem I’ve had is that I can’t seem to get it to verify my voice number-it called once with the verification code but the phone hung up when I answered.  Repeated attempts to get it to call back have thus far been unsuccessful. However, once that issue is resolved, I’m looking forward to shutting down my inbox and letting the important stuff find me.

What do you think of AwayFind? Do you think it would make you more productive?

Our Rating of AwayFind

Tags: Email

Categories:web