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Inbox Reminders
Inbox (literally Google Inbox) has this built-in concept of Reminders. You can do it from the desktop app: It saves you the annoyingness of creating a new email, typing in your own email address, choosing a subject line, and all that. It’s even more awesome on mobile: I email myself a lot (or the concept…
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Noise
Sifting through my post-long-weekend Team CSS-Tricks inbox, it reminds me why so many folks have a bad taste in their mouth about email. Your inbox can get so flooded with noise so quickly. By noise, I mean those emails that aren’t junk or spam, but are just so un-important that spending time on them feels…
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Grunt Work
My mom works at a place where they handle their email system internally. They don’t use any sort of cloud-hosted email. They have their own domain and have @company.com email addresses, and the email servers are set up locally at the brick-and-mortar business. She just gets hammered with spam, and has for years. Something like…
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Why are signatures so bad?
Message from reader Steven Hambleton: Despite the power and intelligence available to companies like Microsoft and Google, we still have five instances of our image-laden signature staring back at us when we reply to an email conversation. Why oh why can’t they detect a duplicate and snip it off? We only need it once! I’m with…
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“Provide an opportunity for escape.”
In the article How to Ask a Favor published by the Valet. magazine staff, they say: Be direct with your request Give your reason why Provide an opportunity for escape Great little framework. If I was to apply it to my publication CSS-Tricks and me reaching out to a potential writer I might say: Hey…
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When to Filter
Email filters seem like a bit of a power-user feature. These are things like “if an email is from this address and contains this text, apply this label and automatically archive it.” It’s pretty cool that we can do that, and I’d wager most clients support some version of that. I recently saw this: That sounds…
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Crossing the Barriers
Hey Chris, just shooting you a text here to let you know I emailed you about that stuff we talk about on the phone. It just doesn’t feel right, does it? I’ll admit, sometimes I don’t mind. Like if it’s a real estate agent whom I’ve told I want to be kept very up to…
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I don’t answer *all* my email.
Of course not. There are people like Daniel Jacobs out there: You don’t deserve my time, Daniel Jacobs. You demonstrated no understanding of me or the site you are asking about. That’s a terrible way to reach out to someone. I’m quite sure you are a real person and this tactic gets you enough leads…
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Poll About Email & Your Job
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Caffeinate your highs, not your lows
The Productivity Cycle by Alex Sexton is a wonderful article that has stuck with me over the years. There is a bunch of it that is about caffeine consumption. Alex cites actual research and provides context, so definitely read the article, but the gist of it is this: Consuming caffeine in time for it to…