Many Businesses, NonProfits and Schools are powered by Google Apps today. The centerpiece of the Google Apps suite is Gmail, with over 425 million users and over 5 million businesses utilizing the services every day.
Another sobering statistic: The average person sends and/or receives 105 emails per day.
Keeping in mind that simply deleting an email takes an average of 3-5 seconds, and opening it to find out if it is worth reading in the first place takes 7-10 seconds, you’re talking some serious time just on email every day.
How can you possibly get through it all?!
Here are the hacks that I use to take back some of that time and gain control over my email box.
Send and Archive
When every second counts, the Send and Archive option is a champion. Once turned on, you get a second Send button option. Now, when I answer an email, I simply hit “Send and Archive” if I am awaiting a reply from the other person.
This clears the message from my inbox, giving me a clear picture of only the emails I have not yet acted on.
Streak CRM
Gmail allows you to install many different kinds of plugins, and one that I’ve found useful is Streak CRM. I know that I don’t use it how it was intended (hence the “hack”), but this saves me time nonetheless.
Once you install it, it gives you a few new features, such as the ability to send Canned Responses:
and the ability to track when your email was opened:
There are lots of other features that go along with this, such as sales and lead funnels, however these are the two features that save me the most time.
There are some phrases that I send that may be repetitive that I can stick into the snippets section (and not have to install a separate program). Additionally, I don’t have to track down someone to see if they’ve read an email I sent – I’ll know, and better yet, I’ll get a good sense of what time they check their email (and what platform they read on) for future reference.
If you knew that your client/colleague/employer routinely reads everything you send them on their phone at 7AM, would you send them a long email or just short bullet points? (Yeah, I thought so.)
IFTTT + Evernote
I live and breathe Evernote. All of my important documents are there. I have the Evernote Clipper installed so that I can save important email threads for posterity, but that wasn’t enough for me, and it is also too manual a process.
Enter my second love, IF. I have set up a rule where, through IF, any incoming email that has an attachment is automatically added to Evernote. My reasoning is that if there is an attachment in the email, it is likely a “higher priority” email than one without an attachment.
Additionally, Evernote’s indexing capabilities allow me to search within the documents and they will be in my account (which has unlimited storage) where I do all my client work.
Those are my top 3 Gmail timesavers – what are yours?
Let us know in the comments!