The communication technology that has come out in the past several years has certainly surpassed the wildest expectations of everyone involved. We can now communicate instantly through a variety of means – text messaging, email, social media, and beyond. While email was at the forefront of modern communication just a few short years ago, it is now lagging significantly behind the others in speed, sophistication, and style. Furthermore, the high number of spam, marketing, and useless emails being sent daily to email accounts the world over means that important messages are being lost in the mix.

The time is ripe to start reducing your dependency on your email client. With the help of software and gadgets recently made accessible for public consumption, you can transfer much of your email burden to alternate locations – your phone, your social media accounts, and, of course, the cloud.

Create a Local Network

One fairly typical way that consumers fill up their inboxes to maximum is by emailing themselves important files and documents. They may start the document on their laptop, then transfer it to their desktop computer to complete or print. Since the number of devices in an average  US home now exceeds the number of persons who live in that home, the attempt to juggle files from one device to another means that email is overburdened with high-bandwidth items that don’t belong there.

• You can create a local network in your home to connect up to seven different devices – tablet, laptop, desktop, and more – making it unnecessary to email anything to yourself for the purposes of printing, reading, etc.
• Create a local network with the use of a media hub like the IOGEAR MediaShair Hub. When you connect it to a flash drive or external hard drive, anything you have stored on that drive is accessible to all of the devices on y our network. You can stream movies stored on the drive or edit and print documents – whatever you need.

Create Your Own Cloud

What about when you need to access your files away from your local home network? You can still keep your files secure and accessible by creating your own cloud storage space. Although quite similar to creating your own network, creating your own cloud takes it one step further by connecting your storage drive to the internet.

• Acquire an external hard drive that has an Ethernet port in addition to a USB port. Connect the drive to your router, and use the software that came with the drive to create a remote access utility. Depending on the software, you can then access the contents of the drive online or through a mobile app.
• Create your own cloud so you can have the greatest degree of privacy and control over your files.

Use Remote Storage

If you’d prefer to not spend the money on an Ethernet-enabled storage drive and don’t mind sharing a public cloud, you can also utilize remote storage services such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Although these are described as a “public cloud,” your files won’t be public – they’ll still only be accessible via a login page on your browser. The difference is that the files are stored remotely on the service provider’s servers, and the security of those servers is under the control of Dropbox or Google, not yourself.

• Most remote storage accounts are free for a basic account. Depending on what types of files you plan to upload, you may need to upgrade to a higher tier of service.
• These services enable you to provide access to your files and folders to others – friends, family, and coworkers – and control the level of access that they have. By utilizing the public cloud, you can simply share access to your files to those who need it – no email required.

Go Social

Not all emails are about passing files and documents back and forth, and it may be necessary for you to reduce more than just your bulky emails in order to feel in control of your inbox. More and more people are joining social media every day, and chances are that many of the people who send you emails are also on social. Moving some or all of your conversations off of email and onto social can help you keep your conversations more organized and productive.

• Twitter. Send short messages via Twitter or engage in longer chats with friends and family. You can also use it to share photos, links, and more.
• Facebook. If you need more space to write, send messages over Facebook. Facebook’s conversation threads make it much easier to keep track of a conversation – especially when more than two people are engaged in the discussion.

In order to clear out your inbox, keep your files and conversations organized, and make your life just a little bit easier, consider utilizing the above techniques in order to reduce your dependency on email today.

(Image source: freedigitalphotos.net)