Sign up | Already Signed Up? Login

Why AwayFind -- To Work or Escape from Work

If you want to get REAL WORK done on the job...

Then you have to deal with email and everything else. But THAT means spending time NOT checking your email
No problem! In fact, the best way to manage email is to process it all at once, and then step away
But what if there’s something urgent that you might miss when you’re not checking email?
Don’t worry! AwayFind allows emergencies to get through to you
Read how this works

If you want to vacation in peace...

  1. Then you need to get away from your email. But what if you get an email about something important?
  2. Common solution: when you’re near a computer, you check your email "just in case there’s something important"
  3. But reading those emails brings you back to the office-world
  4. AwayFind keeps you truly "away" from the office, only notifying you of emergencies
Read how this works

There are so many other uses for AwayFind

Want more background
on why we created AwayFind
and the inspiration behind it?
(expand here)
Sign up

Productivity experts have long suggested “batching” as the solution to dealing with email and freeing up more of our time.  Batching is essentially grouping similar tasks together to improve both productivity and quality of work.  When applied to email, it simply means checking it less often—and processing all the messages once when you do check (for more on email processing, see the links below).  In addition to making it easier to clear our inboxes, this offers the benefit of removing email distractions from the rest of our day.

Some experts, most notably Timothy Ferriss in his best-selling The 4-Hour Workweek, took this idea further by suggesting how to set others’ expectations.  He recommended creating an auto response message that notifies your contacts that you’re only checking email once per day (or something to that effect, depending on the circumstances).  This succeeds in explaining your availability, but it doesn’t address the issue of how to be reached with truly urgent information.

Ferriss suggested that you could include a phone number in your auto response message.  But phone calls can interrupt you as much as emails do—if you pick up the call, you’re immediately involved in the problem (which is usually not all that urgent in the first place).  You may also not want to give out your phone number to anyone who happens to send you an email.

That’s where AwayFind comes in.  By adding a link to your AwayFind page in your auto response message, people have a way to notify you via an alternative, non-intrusive method—text messages on your cell phone (rest assured, though, your phone number is not displayed).  Better yet, messages can be automatically delegated to co-workers who may be able to solve the problem without your involvement. 

AwayFind itself doesn’t solve the problem of too much email, but it provides what we believe is the missing piece in the lessons from today’s leading productivity thinkers.  For more information on batching and processing email—the crucial organizational processes that AwayFind ultimately facilitates—we recommend that you visit these thought leaders:

Sign up