What is Just Use Email?
Just Use Email is a site dedicated to the various ways people and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) should Just Use Email to manage their digital life, their business, and their productivity, all without the use of third-party tools, SaaS subscriptions, two dozen logins, and twenty different interfaces. The premise of this site is that often just using email allows us to be more efficient, effective, and focused, even when offline.
More about Just Use Email
It’s exciting to Just Use Email for modern digital life. It may seem like a throwback, but it’s a popular retro way of managing one’s digital life — and even managing modern small to medium-sized businesses. And it’s coming back en vogue for many important reasons.
This site is about tips and tricks for using just email alone to manage almost all communication online, as well as productivity and business necessities. It’s also about creative and amazing uses of email that may even allow you to cancel some subscriptions elsewhere.
If you’ve been burdened and overloaded with dozens of logins, slow access to information, constantly-changing user interfaces (and 20+ different ones to learn), this website is your panacea. Read on.
If you’re tired of always having to be “online” to try to get work done, or just scratching your head weekly to the point of baldness and wondering, “Now where did that important piece of information go?”, well sit back and relax your way to digital freedom.
You don’t have to be a Luddite to live in the modern world. You don’t have to go completely analog to get away from annoying apps or buzzing notifications. There is a highly reliable method that awaits you, one you may have never truly mastered, but one that has been there all along.
You can actually be more effective, informed and productive. You can actually contact friends, family, and clients in a deeper connected way, and with less stress.
How? By just using email.
There’s lots to post and lots of insight to give, so let’s get started.
My name is Lawrence and I’m a 30+ year veteran of personal computing and a business consultant. I’ve seen thousands of hours of wasted productivity — both personal and business — and in signups for one SaaS (Software As A Service) platform after another.
In 2020, we watched the world get tossed upside down, platform use grow even more frustrating, and some freedoms abridged. In the past decade, we watched software eat the world, and make even the smallest of companies feel compelled to sign up for two dozen online services just to be operational, storing their company data in scattered cloud storage buckets.
At the same time, more people have become aware of privacy implications, and laws like GDPR, CCPA, and many others have made use of these online platforms more legally challenging.
The consolidation of those same services into mega-services seemingly removed alternatives from the market. The message became clear to many small-to-medium sized businesses: either put all your eggs in one or two baskets, or spend time and money training staff on platforms, constantly wrestle with data silos, and be at the mercy of increasing ‘per seat’ licensing. A similar message has played out for personal productivity: you can’t just use simple tools (like email) to manage your life; you need logins — and maybe not just a few of them.
In 2020, I also began to realize, and then cement, that we may have taken things too far with software services, and perhaps computing overall.
Email suddenly began to rise from its legacy accusations to show that, in many cases, it may be faster and easier to Just Use Email for business functions, personal productivity, communication (its original use case), and even data storage.
Once considered to be the most dangerous and ineffective place to store company data or to operate standard business practices, email suddenly looked like the new kid on the block.
Our wheel-spinning web apps were not always as productive as their marketing claimed. Sometimes, their TCO (True Cost of Ownership) was sneakily taking more out of our pockets than it was giving. Some software applications have turned out to be just downright unhelpful, and actually stood in-between us and what we were trying to accomplish in personal and business spheres.
We over-engineered and over-thought things to the breaking point of any competitive advantage.
Email was never broken; we were. My premise is that, outside of large-scale enterprise needs, we have innovated little on the internet that is as omnipotent and omniscient as email.
Many people don’t really know how to manage email or make productive use of it. Many of us use email on web-based platforms that try to do too much for us. Many of our email boxes are overflowing with junk and, at first glance, appear to be the last place we would try to replace our software logins.
I’m going to help you with that and give you back your freedom.
Here in these pages, we will journey together on how powerful email is and how it can revolutionize your weekly life in ways that will amaze you and free you from subscription hell.
It’s time to truly get things done. Just Use Email.