Master Your Inbox: Effective Email Management Strategies

1. Introduction to Effective Email Management 1: On average, we spend about 2 hours every day managing emails. Now, imagine you could cut that time in half and still stay on top of everything. This class is designed to help you take back control of your inbox. You'll learn simple yet effective strategies to organize your emails. Prioritize what matters and save valuable time every day. In this class, you'll learn how to apply the five minute email rule to handle emails quickly and efficiently. You'll learn how to use the four Ds of email management to stay organized and reduce inbox overwhelm. You'll learn how to batch your emails to keep focus and save time. I'll introduce you to a method of staying on top of your email, which I call the priority star inbox method. And this allows you to only focus on the important emails. You'll learn how to turn your inbox into a productivity tool instead of a distraction. Whether you're managing client emails, team communications or just trying to clear the clutter. This class will give you the confidence to master your inbox with ease. By the end of this class, you'll have a clear system to stay on top of your emails while saving time and reducing stress. If you're ready to transform your inbox and make email work for you, then let's get started. 2. Mastering the Basics: Email Management Techniques That Work: Okay. Hello there, and welcome back to this lesson on email management. This is quite an important topic because email can be a time drain and take valuable time away from being productive and organized. Email, unfortunately, is one of those necessary evils. There are both personal emails to action as well as work emails. So it's important to stay on top and organized when it comes to emails. Section is going to be dedicated towards email management, and I'm going to share with you some of my top techniques that I found as a good way to really stay on track when it comes to email and make sure it doesn't take too much valuable time away from your day. So in this section, we're going to be learning about the five minute email rule. This is just a very quick and easy way to handle emails. We're also going to be learning about the four Ds of email management. This is just a great way to categorize your emails into four different categories. And also there's going to be a lesson on batching emails, my technique for batching them. And lastly, you're going to have a look at my Gmail priority star inbox method, which is just a great way to filter emails and make sure that you're focusing on the important emails, and those emails are appearing at the top of your inbox. So there's a lot to cover in this section, and it's going to be a great one. And I can't wait to share all of these techniques with you and just help you to be more productive when it comes to email. That's it for this lesson. I will see you in the next one. Goodbye. 3. The 5-Minute Email Rule: Quick Wins for Your Inbox: Hi, welcome back. This is a lesson on the 5 minutes email rule, which is a simple and quick way to ensure that all of your emails are kept to the minimum amount possible. So why 5 minutes? Well, 5 minutes is a great and ideal amount of time to get your message across. It's also respectful of the recipient's time because they would only need to take 5 minutes to read that email. If you feel that you can't fit in all of the information in the five minute time frame for an email, perhaps then consider scheduling a call or setting up a meeting with that person to go into a bit more depth. So now that we're trying to keep to 5 minutes, a good way to ensure this is to install a browser extension or simply just use the timer function on your phone and set the timer for 5 minutes. This is not to say that for every email you send out, you're going to be setting a timer because that's just impractical and it would be wasting more time. However, do it for a few maybe even a few sessions just so that you can develop that internal clock. Of how long three to 5 minutes is to type out an email. Once you have that internal clock, you're able to accurately gauge how long it's taking to write an email. Then also, if an email requires more detail, consider using a different file format or a different method. By that, I mean, it might serve better as a screencast where you're recording your screen and you're showing a concept or doing some training or showing the person actually what is happening on your screen instead of trying to explain it via email. This can also be really good with audio messages, voice notes, that sort of thing. Sometimes just explaining a process is much quicker than typing it out. So in summary, that is how the five minute email technique works. It's a simple and quick way to just keep in the back of your mind the amount of time you're spending on emails because this is good for both your own productivity and it's respectful of the email recipient's time as well, so they don't have to spend large amounts of time reading these emails. So it has benefits all around. And you'll start to see that the amount of time you're spending on emails because you set a timer. And once you have that timer set, you'll be amazed at how your brain just engages and starts to really come together and get the message out and explain what is needed in that email. So it's just a great way to squeeze out some more productivity, and it's one of my top tips. So I hope you can find that useful, and I'd love for you to give it a try with your next email session. And that's it for this lesson. I'm going to see you in the next one. Goodbye. 4. The 4Ds of Email Management: Decide, Delegate, Do, or Delete: Hi there. In this lesson, we're going to be looking at the four Ds of email management. This is a super effective way to categorize your emails and make sure that you can breeze through them in the shortest amount of time. The four Ds works in a way that you categorize them into emails that you do, emails that you defer, emails that you delegate or automate, and emails that you delete. So as you're seeing here on the screenshots, they are divided into a quadrant. And each of those quadrants has its own priority. So the first quadrant is the do emails. These are both important and urgent. In the second quadrant, you have the important but not urgent. Those are the emails that you should defer or schedule. In the third quadrant, you have the not important, but urgent. These are the emails that you might be able to delegate or automate. And then lastly, in the fourth quadrant, you see the delete emails which are not urgent and not important. Looking at the first quadrant, the do emails, these are emails that should be responded to right away. If an email can be responded to quickly within three to 5 minutes, it should be done straight away. This ensures that you stay on top of them, and it just helps to keep your inbox clean and clear. Examples of those emails would be stared emails and your MITs. We're going to be learning about the stared emails in my priority inbox method in the next lessons. You can also keep it for tasks such as business development, any deadline driven emails, people that are reliant on you to get something done. Um, urgent, unexpected, important daily task. So those are absolute must do, immediately kind of drop everything else type of emails and get them done. In the defer category, these are emails that maybe require a bit more thought and planning, things like learning and reading, notifications and updates. So these are emails that you would defer for later once you are ready to handle them. The third category is delegate or automate. These are emails that might be better handled by somebody else. This would then allow you to offload those emails and tasks to somebody better suited, and that frees up your time to get on with more important tasks. So examples would include assigning tasks to team members or forwarding information requests to the relevant departments. And also things like follow ups and lead generation, research for projects, repetitive emails. So these are really, really good ones for automation. If you're getting a lot of repeat emails, those are prime candidates for automating. So see how they can be automated because each time they come through, that's going to remove the need for you to handle them, and it's going to free up your time. Then the last category is delete. So these are just emails that are not important for you. They could be spam. And of course, if they're spam, you want to be unsubscribing or filtering those out. And all of these emails will just take time away from being productive and just clutter up your inbox as well. And when that happens, it might mean that you could miss important emails, especially if you are allocating a fixed amount of time to handle your emails. If there's unwanted emails in there, they're going to get mixed in with all of the others, and it could take longer to actually organize all of them. So that concludes the lesson on the four Ds of email management. This is just a way to categorize your emails. And as you're handling all of your emails, these are the categories that you should be thinking about as you go through them. Do I defer it? Do I do it immediately? Do I delegate or do I delete? As you practice this technique, more and more, a lot of them will become second nature, and you'll be able to really before even going into the email, you'll be able to know which of these categories it falls into. This is the lesson on four Ds of email management. I'd love for you to try this technique in your next email session and just see how it can help you. Practice makes perfect. Aside from that, I will see you in the next lesson. Goodbye. 5. Batching Emails: Save Time and Stay Focused: Welcome to this lesson on batching emails. We're going to be looking at three different types of batching techniques. Batching emails is a powerful technique to ensure that all of your emails are put into similar categories, and they are contextually relevant to each other. This just helps with that cognitive switching penalty that we discussed in an earlier lesson and just keeps your mind sort of focused on a set category of emails. Three batching methods we're going to be looking at is labels. It is priority, and it is time. So if we look at the first one, which is labels, this is just a system where you create the labels that are relevant to you. They could be things like work or personal or finance or projects or marketing, any number of labels that are relevant to you that you would want to use to be able to categorize your emails. Once you have all of these labels set up, you can create filters in your email program to be able to ensure that the correct labels are applied, as well as maybe adding priority flags to some of these emails. So this would mean that you have an inbox that is categorized into the labels that you have set, and from there, you're able to know the priorities of the emails, and you would start from the most important ones first. The next one is batching by time. This is a very simple method of just starting from the top and working your way down. All the emails are given an equal weighting and priority. This is one method of doing it. I ensures that everything is done. However, the equal weighting and the equal priority, it's not as efficient as it could be. And what can happen is that if you give yourself a limited amount of time to deal with email, those that are less important might be attended to before those that are a priority and are important. So if you are looking to do the time method of batching emails, take it one step further and at least star the emails or prioritize the emails by adding a label or a color or any kind of indicator to make sure that those important ones are bumped to the top of the list so that if in that time frame, you're not able to get through all of the emails, at least you will have covered all of the important and valuable ones. The next batch method is priority, and this is a particularly good one in Gmail as you're able to set your inbox style and layout to the priority inbox. And that just helps you to separate them into sections. This becomes super powerful when you have starred emails, as well as filters on your Gmail inbox because then you can really start to put the emails into the correct section. So examples of that would be sections for important and unread, stared and everything else. In the next lesson, we're going to look at the priority method that I've come up with where you would use different labels and you would have those set up so that you can work from the top down to ensure that you're getting to the most important tasks and emails as they are appearing at the top. So how do I use email batching? I typically use my inbox method, which we're going to discuss in the next lesson. But every 2 hours, I will set around 30 minutes to handle emails. And because of the priority inbox that I've set up, all of the important emails are always pushed to the top. So during that time frame, I'm always dealing with the most important emails, and that ensures that none of the important stuff slips through the cracks. Sometimes there's not enough time in that 30 minute window, and those emails then carry over to the next session. That is perfectly normal. But within a day, I should get 3-4 email sessions and cover all of the most important emails. And of course, during each session, I am using the four Ds email management technique. So I'm having a look to see whether I need to do them now. I need to defer, I need to delegate or I simply need to delete. So that's why by combining all of these methods and having a hybrid system is a really effective way to manage your emails. But I'm super excited to show you my priority inbox star method in the next lesson, and you'll be able to see just how you can take the standard priority inbox in GML and just give it a bit more UF and help you to be more productive and stay on top of your emails. But for this lesson, that's it. And I'm going to see you in the next lesson. Goodbye. 6. Gmail Priority Star Method: An Overview of the Method: Welcome back to this lesson on the priority star method. This is just a way that I've found to most effectively organize and categorize priority emails, and it is just a way to ensure that you're getting to your most important emails and your priority emails before any of the others. So before we dive into the setup and the configuration in the next lesson and video, I'd like to give you an overview of how it works and what to expect and just to give you some insights on what this method is about. In the next video is where I break it all down, and we walk through step by step to see all of the settings, all of the configurations, all of the different aspects of this method, and you're able to see step by step how it works so that you too can master your emails using this method. Let's look at some preliminary steps, so you have an idea of what to expect. So the most important task is to set it up and configure it. So this is where we're going to set up the different sections and the filters. So we're displaying the important sections first, and then also the filters will ensure that the emails are put into those sections. As we can see from the screenshot using the priority inbox type. Is where you get access to these different settings. So the inbox sections can then be defined by yourself. So in this example, I have the start section first, then it's the important. Then there is the custom label. This would be your high priority, most important label that you would add. For me, it was a payment label, which I've called A finances, pay as soon as possible. But for you, it could be different. It could be project related or marketing. It's just up to you what you want that most important label to be. Then lastly is the everything else section. That's where all the other emails will live. Then looking at the stared emails, this is where you can manually star the emails. This is particularly handy if you're on the go on the move, and you're using your app to be able to star emails. Then when you sit down again, you can see those emails appearing. It just helps you to really stay organized while on the go. Then processing the emails, it's as simple as taking a top down approach because all of the most important emails are at the top, that is where you start, and you would aim to complete maybe three to five per day, or if it's more project based, then three to five emails per week might be more realistic. Then lastly, it's important to stay focused because the temptation to look at other emails might be great. But if you're focused and you stick to the stared emails and work your way down, that's going to ensure you get to the most important stuff first. And that's going to drive the biggest results for you and help you to stay organized, and you're not going to let email take away your valuable productivity time. So this is the gist of how it all works. In the next lesson and video. We're going to dive into it. I'm going to walk you through all of the settings, and you're going to be able to see just how it's pieced together and how you can apply the same settings and use this in your workflow to achieve inbox bliss and stay productive and not fall behind each day. That's it for this lesson. We're going to dive into the priority star method in the next lesson. So I will see you there. Goodbye. 7. Gmail Priority Star Method in Action: A Step-by-Step Demo: This is the priority star method, which I use inside of Gmail, just to make sure that I am the most effective and most productive when dealing with emails. Emails are one of those things that we can't get away from. They're here to stay, unfortunately, but there are ways to be more efficient and to deal with them in a more effective manner. So in this lesson, we're going to dive into the settings and filters that will help you just be more productive and manage email more efficiently. You might opened up your email inbox, and you just see a flood of emails that have come through. You randomly skim through them and maybe start with the first one that seems important. If this sounds familiar, it is one way of doing it, yes, but there's a much more effective way. And in this lesson, we're going to dive into the settings and the filters that are going to allow you to do it more effectively and save time at the same time, which is the goal here. So let's get into it and let's make you more productive. So, here is the Gmail inbox. This is how it would look once you've set up all of the settings, which we're going to go through now. So this is just to give you an overview of what my inbox looks like. So coming to the settings icon, we see the quick settings, and we're going to get to that in a second. But let's just walk through the other settings. So hat and meet, if you use chat and meet inside of Gmail, that's where you would customize it here. Density dependent on your eyesight or other sort of issues. Going the most compact is the best route. I mean, we can see here how it just really compacts things and makes it a lot more effective to view. The inbox type, so this is a key setting here. We are going to be using the priority inbox, and we're going to be customizing that in a second. The reading pane, no splits is normally the default setting I have, but you are able to use a reading pane. I sometimes use it actually when I need to get through a whole batch of emails, and you need to quickly one by one, have a look and see what the content is, reply to emails, that sort of thing. I generally use it for everything else emails that you see here. But by default, I keep it to the no split. Email threading. This is another key setting. You want to be able to view emails in a conversation view. Otherwise, every new email that is coming through from that conversation is going to be sent as a separate email. So the conversation view just groups everything, I stacks them nicely above one another, and you're able to see that full message thread. So let's get into the settings. All of these ones that we're starting off with here, they are personalized to yourself, how you want them, nothing too fancy to look at there. The undo send, it's always good to have the set to ten or 20 seconds. This gives you some time to undo an email if it's sent and just prevents those awkward emails where you might have to send a follow up. Hover actions always good to have this. It just enables you to see the actions at a glance when hovering over emails. Send an archive that is to your preference, however you like it. Default text style. I stick with the standard there. Images always display. That's just to have media rich emails. Some emails need those images to be able to see the context, that's always good. Dynamic emails, this should be enabled. Now, a dynamic email are those emails that you receive from, for example, from other Gmail and Google applications. So if you have a comment on a Google document or a Google spreadsheet, you're able to add the comment in GML without leaving GML to go and add the comments. So it's just a handy way to save a little bit of time. Grammar, always good to have that s. Same for spelling, auto advance. So this is quite handy with that split pane method. Once you've replied to an email, you've sent the email. Instead of jumping back to the inbox, it's going to go to the next email or the next conversation as well, depending on what sits below it. Auto correct. You want to have that on. It's always good writing suggestions, always good personalization on conversation view on. We've already discussed that. Nudges. This is generally good until maybe Google gets a bit annoying, but always good to have it on. Smart reply. Definitely, it will then suggest names and other greetings, things like that. So it's good to have and can make things a bit quicker to respond. Mark conversation is read after 3 seconds. That's to your preference. Turn on smart features and personalization. Always good. Same thing with other products. Turn on package tracking. This is actually quite good to have. Google have that dynamic packaging information whenever it detects an email that is related to tracking a package. Desktop notifications, this is as you want it. I've set this off. Because there are periods where I batch emails, and I generally don't need to be notified while I'm working in other applications. So stars, this is where you're able to add stars and other icons. This is up to you how many you'd like to add and how many colors you'd like to have. But for my method, I use three stars, and these represent yellow star as the review stars. This is the default star, and it allows me to add emails there, which are maybe reports. So something like traffic analytics that have come through for my websites or look a studio reports, things like that. And it also is the default star status. So if you need to have automation to add stars to your emails, they would use that star, and you could then manually review them to decide if it needs to be a blue star or a red star. So the blue star is a task that is a MIT, which is the most important task. And the red star is for something that is urgent, so that would take priority over everything else, and that should be done first. You could also use some of the other stars and icons here to kind of adapt the system and develop your own way of dealing with these emails. Keyboard shortcuts that should be on as well. It's really handy to be able to use the C key to compose a new email, use the ar key, to reply to an email, things like that, make it very helpful. Button labels, icons or text, however you prefer, create contacts. This can be handy. And then email signatures, that's as you like it. Personal level indicators. Yes, show indicators we do want because that way we're able to see when it's sent directly to us and not sent as a CSD email or anything like that. We're then able to at a glance, know if it is sent to us directly. Show snippets. These are good, so you can have that little snippet of text to be able to see what the email is about. And that's it for the general settings. Right. So next we're going to move on to the priority inbox. So the default is what you will get GML set at, right out the box. We want to change that to the priority inbox. Once you've done that, you're able to see all of these different options. You have four inbox sections. The first one, I'd recommend as the stared section. Where this is going to show all of your stared items, then we have a custom label section. So this could be any custom label that is important to you. I've set this to a payments label so that any payments I need to make, they are going to appear there first. The important and unread that then becomes everything else that isn't labeled payments or is not labeled star with stars. And then everything else is everything else that doesn't fit into these other three categories. So the whole concept here is to get your most important emails right up at the top. That's kind of the objective here. Because stared emails you manually set yourself so they are emails where GML doesn't do anything with them. Only you add the star label. So it means that it is manually added by you, and those then become at the top of the list. And sometimes I will even just collapse all of these other sections let me just show you quickly. I would collapse all of these other sections and just work on the starred emails until those were finished. Once those are finished, open everything up again and then start from the top down. So the idea is to have the more important priority emails at the top and then just work your way down. Another thing to mention is try to keep three to five emails in the stared section. If there's too many that are being added there, it will seem a bit cluttered and it might not be as effective as you'd like it. So once you have those three sections all set up, then with the everything else section, you would then use the four Ds of time management. So you would do delegate, defer, and delete all of those emails, and by following those four Ds, you're able to get through them a lot quicker. Okay, so moving on, we're going to set up a filter to create the start emails. So coming in here, there's two ways to do it. You can either come into the settings, filters and blocked addresses section and create a new filter or simply click on the Options icon over here to get to the same window. So I'd like to set up a filter that is going to look at all of the emails from my accountant. I want to make sure that the emails have certain phrases and certain text in them to trigger the filter, and it also should be having an attachment. So these are emails that are going to be coming through that I need to make a payment for. So in the from field, of course, that would be the email address, who would send to, in this case, it'll be me by default, the subject. If you know the subject of the emails and they're consistently the same subject, then you would add that. For here, I would add something like payment, and you can use operators like or to have multiple keywords. Payment or VAT or Invoice. Doesn't have. So this is where you would add any keywords that you wouldn't want to be included. And I want to say has an attachment. So to test this filter, to see what it would bring up, we can do a search, and this would then search your entire inbox to be able to see what would come up. If everything looks as it should and is picking up the correct keywords, you can then say create filter. And this is where you get all of the filter options. So if you wanted to skip the inbox and archive it, definitely not what we want to do here, nor do we want to mark it as red. But yes, we do want to star it. So we're going to star it. And then any of these other settings, like if you have to forward it or if you want to send a template, which is quite handy. If you have template set up, it will automatically send those template emails to them. If you want to always mark it as important, you can always add that. You can also choose categories that you'd like to apply to it. So then what we would do then is create the filter. So that's it. Every time that email comes in with those criteria, it's going to add it to the stared section. And you're able to snooze emails, as well. So if there is a snoozed email and it's starred as well, it's only going to appear on the snooze date when that comes up. So that's just another great way to use the stared section. You can then have snoozed emails, and it's not going to fill up your stared section. So this one I do know has been snoozed. So this is what it would look like here. And when that comes up for 30 July, it will appear in the stared section, and I'll know that it is due for payment. Well, that is the priority star method in a nutshell. It's quite simple in its design, but the goal and objective for it is to make sure that your priority emails are at the top of your inbox, so they become top of your list. You're then able to discern which of the emails in the stared section is the most important. So like we said, the yellow email, that's the default status. So it's kind of the standard. We then have the blue status, which is for task that you need to carry out. And then the red star status is for very urgent emails that need to be attended to as a priority. So with that simple method, you're able to quickly at a glance, know what needs to be done. Then we also touched on how to create and use filters. So we were able to set up a filter so that when the emails come through, they are automatically categorized for us. That's an important part of just making sure none of these emails slip through the cracks. Then for all of the other emails, it's a good idea to use the four Ds of time management. So we would do defer, delete or delegate, and that's how you would handle everything else in your inbox. And that pretty much sums it up. So I hope you were able to learn a couple of tips and see how I manage my emails. I found this to be not just the most simple way. These type of things, they shouldn't be too complex. It should be easy to carry out. And I think this is such a method. But I urge you to improve on it or personalize it or adjust it for your workflow because it's something that can really help you manage your emails a lot effectively. Because emails are one of those things that can just sap your time if you allow it to, and you don't have to lose time with emails, and this is just one way of showing you how you can gain some time back through effective email management. So that's it for this lesson, and I will catch you in the next one. Goodbye. 8. Gmelius: Your New Gmail Superhero: Welcome back to this lesson on Gamelius. Gamelis is a top productivity tool, and it's extension that sits inside of Gmail, and it has so many different features. It's like a Swiss Army knife for your email inbox. It has things like templates, task management. You can have a Cvanbard you can have email notes. You're able to have collaborative tasks that you can share with team members and so much more. It really allows you to just squeeze out more productivity from your emails. And I've been using it for quite a number of years now, I think, about six years in total and I got onto it by just wanting to have a tool that allowed me to add notes to my email. So if I needed a bit of context for an email, there wasn't a native way inside of GML to be able to do this. So I found amelis and was incredibly happy to see that it not only provided that, it also had so many other features, and another feature that I really like is the calendar availability widget that you can insert into email. So I'm sure you've had the same issue where you're trying to set up a meeting with somebody and you're trying to find a good time, and it's a back and forth. And there's a few emails sent, and that time's not suitable, but are you available for this time? And this allows you to just put a little calendar widget. It looks at your calendar, so it syncs with Google calendar, and it will pull in all of your existing calendar events and will then give your free slots in the email widget so that the recipient of the email can simply choose a slot that suits them. And the rest is set up, and the meeting is scheduled. So it's a really top tool. And in the next video and lesson, I'm going to walk you through Gemellus just so you can see the power of this tool to see if it will be right for you. But for now, let's just go through some of the top features. These are the features that I think you're going to like. So, of course, email templates, that is a given, it works a lot like the C templates that GML provides, but it takes it a step further in that you're able to create templates that can not only change the body text of the email, but it can also change the subject line and the recipients. So if you're frequently adding CCs to other contacts, and you always want to have a specific contact for a email template, you're able to do this. You can use quick shortcuts to be able to get to these templates. So in the subject line, if you were to type in hash tag email template one, it would bring up that specific template. It would then add all of the context. It would then change the subject. It just allows you to do all of these really, really great things. Next, it can be used for task management. So we've been talking about Trell on this course, and I love how Trello offers the Caban boards, but you can get access to those same C band boards inside of your Gmail. So it'll sync with Trill and synchronize all of your task. So as you add new tasks to Trello, it is synced to your Gmail account and vice versa. So this just allows you to not leave the comfortable environment of Gmail, but still being able to track your tasks. Then some more advanced functionality like sequences and automations, you're able to use this for lead generation as well as handling client requests, that sort of thing. So as they come in, you are able to set sequences. So it would follow a strict sequence of events. So you would tag maybe other team members to those emails. I would send it to another team member. It just allows you to automate the emails that you are receiving and kind of use it a bit like you would a shared inbox with your team members. And that of course is another feature is you can have shared inboxes. This is really great for teams and customer service applications. So you can all have a look at the same emails and messages and just see at a glance how they've been handled, who's been handling them, and manage them from there. The availability meeting scheduler. I spoke a little bit about that previously. That is where you're able to put in your free slots from your calendar, and the recipient can then choose their perfect time. Next, you can add notes to emails. This is one of the simplest but most efficient features that I love about Gamelius. I use it to add rich text descriptions, if I need to add context, if I need to add URLs to documents that are relating to the emails. I can do that all within the notes section. So these are just a handful of the top features and things that I love about Gamelis. And in the next lesson, we're going to be looking at a demonstration. I'll walk you through this and you'll be able to see how all of these cool things work and see how that can fit into your workflow. But for this lesson, just giving you an overview of Gamelius, that is it, and I will see you in the next lesson where we dive a little bit deeper. I'll see you there. Goodbye. 9. Gmelius in Action: Demo and Best Features: And welcome to another lesson. We're going to be looking at Gemels, which is an advanced productivity plugin for Gmail that allows you to have superpowers inside of Gmail, things like collaborative working. You're able to have a Kanban task board. You're able to work with templates. You're able to meeting calendar, availability, widgets inside of your emails. You can add email notes, so you can have context next to an email whenever you read it or whenever somebody else in your team is looking at that same email. You can have follow up notification so you can set a time of three weeks or one day or two days or next week to be able to follow up an email if no one responds to it. So that's just one great feature that will just make sure that no emails slip through the cracks. I've been using the software since about 20:16, and it's really helped with my overall productivity and just email management in general. It's changed a little bit since then. Their focus has moved more towards a collaborative tool. So you'll notice that there are some functions that are more geared towards teams and customer service related applications, that sort of thing. But for the most part, it still has some really, really solid functionality, and I couldn't be happier using it every day in my email workflows and just to just sort of tackle email in general. It's a really top tool, and I can't wait to show you it. So let's dive in. Right, so we are going to look at the back end first. I think that will help you to see what is going on behind the scenes with Jamalis. So here we are. This is the interface. This is where you would set up all of your templates and rules and things like that. So here we're looking at the labels. It will create some labels inside of GML for you. This is just so that it can automatically tag the emails that Jamalis works with. You are able to have a GTD board, which is get it done board. That's just a task board. So this is one of the other great features is you can have a Kanban task board, all within your email program, all within Gmail. So you wouldn't even need to leave Gmail to be able to get all of your task done. It does sync up with Trello as well, so you're able to work either in Trello or in Gmail, and it will sync between the two tools. So that's quite handy. You're able to create rules. Now, these are the sequences of events and tasks that are followed by certain conditions. So if an email comes in, it should be tagged in a certain way. You're able to send automatic replies, that sort of thing. You're able to assign specific email conversations to team members. So this is mainly focused on team based use. As you can see here, a lot of these are locked, and it means that you have to upgrade your plan to be able to get access to them. I'm on the premium plan, and I don't really see the need for this functionality as yet. I use team communication in Slack and other channels. So for me, that's not really a requirement. I get fantastic value from all of the other functions that it provides. But it is there and available to you. So what a rule might look like is you would set the trigger. So for each new message of a conversation or conversation assigned to you would then have some conditional statements. So if the sender's email address contains certain characters or is a certain email address, then this is what needs to occur. Directly after or directly, and then the action that is carried out. So you will assign it to somebody. You will change the status. You will add it to a board view, add it to a workspace, remove it from a workspace, and then here you also get some Gmail functions as well, so you can move it to the inbox, send an automatic reply. Mark is important, things like that. A lot of these are covered in your standard Gmail filters. So I feel that you're able to achieve these with simple Gmail filters already. So let's move on to templates. These are really handy. So what I like about these templates is it's not just going to add a template and boilerplate snippet to the body of your emails. It is also able to add CC email addresses. So if you always want to be CCing somebody, you can include that in there. It can use variables, so it can take the first name of the person that's sending the email. You can include that there. You can add some various other elements. So it's templates on steroids, essentially. It gives you a lot more functionality than you would have with the basic templates in Gmail. So let's have a look at one of them. So this is called the simple greeting. I've named it simple greeting here. I've given it a shortcut, and I'll show you in a second where that shortcut comes into play. Subject. This is an optional field that you can change. Generally, it's not a good idea if you're in a conversation with somebody to change the subject of the email because then it becomes a new thread for them. However, if you're using it for internal use where you want to forward it, or you want to send it to Trello or some other automation, this is where you would add your own text there. Right. So then in here, this is what the message of your template would be. So here we've already included a variable. This is the two first name. And to get to that, we use the variable command here, and you can create custom variables, so you could have things like a company name or anything like that. But what's really useful here is having the first name or the full name or the CC names. So you have a few options to work with there. You can also add dates. This is good if you wanted to have a template to simply request a meeting tomorrow or next week, and you don't want to have to look at what that date would be or anything like that. So that just saves a little bit of time there. And what is NIFT is you can have fallbacks for the default value. So if you're not able to get the variable, you can put down a backup value to be able to have something in place there. So it's not just a blank space. So those are the variables. And then here, you would have the option to create an HTML rich email. You could put whatever you want in. You could put images in. I mean, you could really go to town with how you want these templates to look. So it is exactly how you want it. It's on brand. It contains all of your information. It's consistent, and it's error free. So then we have some settings as well. This is where you can add recipients. So if you always want to have CC recipients, you can add them. And if you wanted to include my signature as well, you can put that in there. The sharing, if you want to share this with the whole team or certain people, you're able to do that, as well. So those are the templates. Sequences, as you can see here, this is an upgraded feature, but essentially this would allow you to have sequences and flows to your email so that you can send them down different paths to be able to handle them a bit more efficiently. So this is really good for sales pipelines or projects or customer service desks where you want to have scenarios and provide a series of steps for each of those email messages. That is possible there. Same thing with campaigns, and this I quite like because it's really a lightweight way to send email campaigns. So I'm sure you've heard of the big email service providers like Mailchimp or active campaign or things like that, where it can be quite expensive to even send just a few hundred emails. This makes it possible to send everything from your Gmail inbox, and it gives you some important metrics as well. So the open rate is there And it's all possible from within your inbox. So that's just a really nifty way to keep things inside of Gmail and not having to use another tool, which could be an extra added cost. Meetings. Now, this is one of my favorite features. This allows you to sync up your calendar, and what it will do is you can add a little meeting widget inside of your emails that looks at factors like your free time available. So if you've got meetings throughout the day, it will look for free slots automatically and provide that as an option for somebody to select a meeting. You can then specify that you want to be able to have a buffer of, say, ten to 15 minutes after each meeting. So it'll allow for things like that. And it's just a really clever way to ask people to request a meeting from you, and then they're able to book a slot from your calendar. And that way, everything is automated. There's no back and forth, like, Oh, does this time work for you? Oh, no, that's no good. Does this time work for you? Could we do that time? So that whole back and forth that you might have experienced when just trying to set up a meeting. This solves all of that and people just pick a slot and the meeting is set and you're good to go. So if we take a look at some of the settings that are available to you. So this one I've just called a 30 minute meeting. You can have any length meeting that you want. You can then set a little shortcut. So this is great to be able to just bang this in quickly into an email with a shortcut. It's already placed inside your email. You can then copy this link. You can share it on other platforms as well. So it's not just inside of Gmail, you could share it on Slack or WhatsApp or anywhere that you are communicating with people. So these are the basic settings, you can see here, it's synced up to my calendar. And then next we set up the schedule. So it's going to look at your time zone to make sure that the meetings are set correctly at the correct time. You would put that in if you've got any public holidays that you want to include in there, so they're not booking slots when you're on holiday. I'm in Portugal, so, of course, I would have that. Oh, it's actually when are the next holidays coming up? August 15. Okay, that's great to know. Time slots. So this is where you set your availability times for meeting. It doesn't have to be the full day. You can set whatever you want. It can change on different days. So if you want to make your meetings maybe Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, that's where you would set it up. You can set the time for that and as many slots as you want per day and the times that you want for those. So here is where you set the meeting duration. Is it a quick 15 minute meeting? Is it 30 minutes? Is it an hour? That's up to you, meeting buffers. So this is where I was saying that you able to have a bit of time before and between meetings. So if like me, after a long meeting, you needed to debrief and just get your notes together. This allows you time to do that so that you're not rushed into the next meeting. And you can set the maximum number of meetings that you want to have in a calendar. So if you've already got five meetings on the go, it's not going to allow any more meetings for that day. And here the book range, this is asking, so how far into the future do you want to allow the availability for? It can be days, it can be hours, and you would just set those options there. You can also collect some proprietary information. So if you just wanted to collect their email address as well during the process, you can do that, as well. Email reminders, you can. That does need an upgraded plan to be able to work. But otherwise, that's it. You would save the meeting, and then I will show you where I'm just going to discard these changes. I'll show you in a bit when we go to the Gmail side of things where this would come into play. But that is pretty much it. This is the dashboard for Jemelus and this is where you would set up everything. So let's hop over to GML and see it in action. Okay, so we are in Gmail now. So let's see how this all comes together and how you can actually use Jemelus from inside of Gmail. So what you'll see is that it's going to have added a couple of new sections. So you have all shared conversations. So this is all of your shared conversations. These will be shared to a workspace, and inside that workspace, whoever is a part of it, all of your team members, they would be able to see all of the shared emails. So again, this is really good for sales teams or customer service teams that need to handle emails that are coming in and assign them to other people, and everybody gets a clear view of that here. It creates some new boards. So this is a great function of amelius you're able to have a CBA task board. So if we load that up, it has the CVN lists view, so we can see everything in the inbox. This is what is to do in progress pending, and you can also have a complete or a closed column here. Let's just enable that so you can see it in action. But you can also have custom columns as well. So those are good there. And as you would expect, you're able to drag cards over. This is an email. So it's an email that is originating from your GML inbox, but you can play with it and manage it like you would a task. So we're able to take it through the different stages there, which is super handy. And from in here, you're able to get a bit more functionality. You're able to tag these conversations, add a due date, and this is where other people and even yourself would be able to just have a bit more context on these tasks. So it's easy to add new tasks. You would just add that here, and it would be set up like that. So you could essentially just use it as a very simple task tracker. You could have everything in there, and you would never have to leave the comfort of GML. That's what makes it really great. So those are the That's the CBantaskbard, inside of Gmail. This would sink to a real board on Trell. So this is what it would look like on Trello. As you can see there, it's syncing everything. We have all of the task there. I just created that task, you'll notice, and it's already been synced here. And there is everything listed there. So yes, you could use Trello to create all of your tasks and manage everything there. But you also have the power to be able to do it inside of Gmail with Jamalis. So those are the boards. You have some analytics there. If you want to see what's going on, I think, yes, this is for a higher plan. It is going to create a label, and that's for you to see which of the emails amelius has used and is working with. But if we go to our inbox, and we just see some of the functionality. So in a composed new email situation, this is where you could have some of those templates apply. So you might remember we had a look at templates, and this is where you could add them. We also had the shortcuts that were listed there, so we can start to use those here. And by adding them to the subject line, using the hashtag is the prefix for those shortcuts. So as you can see here, we have the simple greeting. We have the meeting request next week. And we have the other meeting reply with calendar slots. So let's just do a simple greeting. This would obviously be for a reply. So let's just have a look at how that would work. So we reply here. Let's do a pop out reply, so it's a bit easier to see at its subject. I'm going to enlarge here. So here, let us Add the hashtag, and let's use a simple greeting. So there you could see it used the first name here. You would then add the message here. And if you had a template, this is where all of the other content would appear. So let's have a look at that and see what it would look like using a different template meeting request. There it's put in the date. Then let's have the calendar slots reply, and this is where you would add the calendar widget. So if you wanted to, you could also add the URL that you saved for the meeting. You would add that in here. But from here, we can see that there are some new icons added. These are Gemellus icons, and they have different functions. So to add the meeting slots availability widget, you would just click Insert meeting. It then has a look at your calendar and is then able to provide all of the slots available. So you would email that to your recipient, and they would then choose their slot. So the other nifty little features that you can have. So let's assume that you've set up that little widget. You have that there, and you want to then follow up. If there's no response, you would set a follow up, and from here, you get a few more options. You could have these quick select options, which is later today or tomorrow morning. This weekend next week, you also have a few other options here, and you can also choose a date. So if you know you need to get a response by a certain time, you would then select the date. So there, we're going to set the follow up. But what is really neat here is checking this option. So only if no one replies. That means that if you do not receive a reply, it will remind you and bring the follow up notification back to your inbox. If somebody replies, it cancels it out and you don't have to worry about that. You can also have that upon opening. So that's when they open the email, you're able to track it. And then speaking of tracking emails, you can track when the email is opened by the recipient so that you know that they have received it. The templates. So here is where we have all of those templates. It's just another way to get to the templates area. So if we had an email that we put in here and we wanted to include Oops, not that. We wanted to include some templates. We would come in here sequences. You might remember that is on a different plan. So if you're on a higher plan, you have access to those. But templates we're looking at, this is also where you could get to that. So we use the quick shortcut to get to it. Remember we added the hash tag here, but you can do it through this little icon as well. So you would just select whatever you want, and it adds it in there. Next, we're going to look at the email notes function. Now, this I found to be super handy. This is one of the main features that I was looking for that got me onto Gamelius all those years ago, the ability to take simple notes and add them to an email. Sometimes I needed a bit of context, sometimes I needed a bit of extra information, and it just allowed me to have that sitting right next to the email, and Jimelis provides that. So if we have a look here, I've already added a little note here, but what you would do then is add a simple note here. You can even mention other people. So if you're working in a team, you would mention them. But here, you can just add simple text. And you can even attach documents so you could attach a file if you wanted, and also include things like URLs. So if we wanted to put a URL in there, which is really handy for just rich notes that you're able to add, some Emojis as well if you want, and then Control Enter or hit that to save. You can then edit notes as well. So that's just a really simple feature, but super powerful. I mean, the amount of times that I use the notes function is a lot, and it just provides that context for emails just so that you don't have to go to a Google Doc or find another email or anything like that. You have everything there available to you. And the Gemelius icon is sitting here in the list of all the extensions that you have for Gmail, along with Trello and all the others there. So it's easy to get to. And and then lastly, you've got some integrations as well. So Jemels is able to integrate with some of the top apps and tools, and it just enhances the functionality of it. And it's really great. I mean, even applications like make and Zapia Slack, so you can be notified when somebody adds a note or something like that, you can be notified of shared conversations when new leads are added to your workspaces, that is Gamelius. And as you can see, it's simple but incredibly powerful, and it's one of those email productivity tools that just allows you to up your game and just be more productive and manage emails in a much more effective way. I've been using it for many years. I will continue to use it for many years. I can't see working without it. It's just a really great tool. And I hope I could show you some of the functionality. And I'd love for you to try and use it in your everyday productivity needs and workflows and working with team members, that sort of thing. So I'd love for you to try it and let me know how it goes. But that is Jamalius and I hope this was a good introduction into this super powerful extension for GMO. That's it for this lesson, I will catch you in the next one. Goodbye. 10. Write Emails 3x Faster with Lipsurf: Welcome to this lesson on email productivity tools, specifically talking about ipserf. Lipsurf is a Chrome browser extension that just brings the power of voice to text, as well as some other nifty features like voice control. So you're able to not only dictate your emails and documents and online forms, anywhere where there is a text field, you're able to use this extension. But also, you can control the browser using this extension. So it is super powerful and it's a really good productivity tool. And I wanted to share with you some of its top features. Of course, the main function is that of dictation. And as we know, dictation can speed up your writing and typing time by up to three times. So it is a huge timesaver, but not just time. It can help you be more efficient by giving the correct spelling for all of the words that are being dictated, so you don't have to do as much editing and proof reading. So it really is a timesaver in all types of typing and dictation, whether that is for documents or emails or online forms and text fields. As I mentioned, voice control for browsing, so you're able to open new tabs. You're able to visit websites. You're able to use the clipboard contents to paste into text fields. There is just so many different uses and features that it's able to help you with. Of course, a voice dictation that is one of the biggest benefits and features of this extension, and it also has multilingual support. So if you'd like to use different languages, it has you fully covered. Customizable commands. This is great, where you can create your own custom shortcut. So if you say a unique phrase, it will then give a snippet or it will take you to a specific website, so it has a lot of customizable options. You're also able to use it for language learning, which means that it has multilingual support, which is really good. It integrates with other apps, whether you're in Gmail or Google Sheets, you can still use it using the voice commands, and that makes it incredibly powerful. Then lastly, it helps with repetitive stress injuries, RSSI and carpal tunnel issues. So if you're finding that being on the keyboard, using your mouse, it affects your wrists and forearms, this is a really great tool to just relieve some of the pressure and the time you're spending typing. By allowing your voice to do all of the actions and the typing. So I found great help with this, and it provided a lot of relief in terms of RSSI and just aching wrists and forearms, in general, it was able to really give me some relief there. With that, that's the end of the lesson, and I will see you in the next one. Goodbye. 11. Lipsurf in Action: Demo and Best Features: Hey, guys. Welcome back to another liston. We're going to be looking at Lip serve, which is a browser extension that gives you speech to text capabilities, as well as it allows you to control your browser with your voice. Now, this has to be one of my top productivity hacks. The ability to replace typing with dictation and voice to text, technology, is something that can really turbocharge your productivity. I mean, dictation can help you type three times as fast as if you were manually typing out the same text. So it's going to mean that your emails are going to be done faster. A text on screen, whether it's on forms or in messages to colleagues on Slack, any kind of environment where you're using text, this browser extension is going to let you do that a lot more efficiently. And not just speed. It allows you to use the correct spelling for words as well. So you're going to be writing faster and you're going to have the correct spelling, so it's just going to save time overall in the long run. Another great feature I found is that it can help with things like repetitive stress injuries. So if you're sort of typing out a lot and you get strain in your wrist or your forearm or anything like that, it can really help improve that because you're not having to type as much. You're using your voice instead of typing. So things like carpal tunnel, it can really aid with that. And that's something I struggled with for a few years when I was working some crazy hours, launching my own business and growing I would at the end of the day just really have forearms and wrists that were just aching and not happy. So this was another push for me to find a solution, and I found that in lip surf and just dictation in general is the way to go. Now, you might be thinking that I've tried dictation. I've tried speech to text, maybe in the Windows environment or there was another application, and it just didn't work for you. That was the case a good few years ago, but speech to technology has come so far in recent years. So there's massive improvements, there's massive improvements with cognition, how the technology understands what you're saying, and also the clarity of your microphone plays a big part. So having a good mic, as well as using a modern browser extension like lip serve is a winning combination to be able to get good dictation and speech to text functionality in your workflows. And I use this for a range of applications. I mean, everything from emails to writing documents to writing articles for my website, even slack messages, WhatsAp messages, anywhere where you're writing text or, um, or messages, you can use this browser extension to be able to voice type for you. So that is a really nifty feature. It's not just limited to say Gmail or Google Docs. It's across any website or platform that uses the Chrome browser. So without further ado, let's get into it and see it in action. So I'm here at the Lip surf homepage. If you want to take a look and see what it's all about, this is a great starting point. But let's try some of the functions. So, browser control. Let's open up a new tab. Let's close that tab. Let's visit a website. Let's scroll between different tabs. So let's have a look and see how that would look. So once the plug in an extension is installed, you would see this little icon over here, and already you can see it's giving me a transcription of everything that I am saying. This transcription is optional, so you don't have to have it appearing if it's a little bit distracting to you. So let's see it in action. I'm going to ask it to create a new tab. There we go. Closed tab, YouTube, closed tab, tab four. Right, so that has got us to this point here, so I'm just going to switch it off there. You can also run commands like so if it is transcribing, you can say sleep. Sleep and there it's switched it off. So here we have some example content. We're just going to do some basic working with text commands here and just really show you some of the cool functionality that you can have. So let's switch it back on. There we go. Go to bottom, select previous ten words, capitalize all caps. Copy backspace. Pace Paste Delete previous word. Delete previous three words. Move backward five words. Move forward two words. Down up, go to top. New paragraph. Sleep. So there you could see I was doing some basic working with text. So we were able to capitalize. We were able to create the text as all caps uppercase. We were able to move the cursor between words. We were deleting some of the words. We were selecting them. We were copying them, we were pasting them. So that's just a brief intro into some of the functions that you can do with text. And that comes in handy when you're dictating long paragraphs of text and you want to sort of move back a couple of words and maybe add in some extra text that just allows you to be able to do that. It's not just a purely speech to text functionality. So then there are also modes, which is really handy. So we can have a dictation lock mode. Now, this is going to mean that it goes into a locked dictation mode. So you reduce the risk of any commands that would be done while you're dictating. So it purely looks at speech to text. So let's have a look and see how that would work. Dictate lock mode. So now that we're in the dictation mode, you can see by the icon there that it is purely using speech to text. If we were to use commands like copy or backspace or up, it would not do anything with those. So there we go. We've written out two lines. Now I'm going to switch back to normal mode. Normal mode. And let's see if this is in effect. Normal mode. Right. So now that we are in normal mode, we can start giving our commands again, select previous ten words. Sleep. So I just want to show another mode, which is the spell mode, and that allows you to spell out individual words. So if there's something that is unique or it's in the language that you speak and it needs to be very specific, you're able to spell the word out. So let us activate that mode. Spell mode. DATING. Normal mode. So I was able to spell out words there. So that's another mode that is possible. Okay, so now we're going to move on to Gmail. Now, what I'm going to show you is some navigation commands that you can run. Search productivity. Select two. Star, unstar move to trash. View three. So there you were able to see we could get into a search query. So we were searching for productivity, and then we selected the second email. Let's just get back to search productivity. So we would then get into the third email. So it would actually allow you to open up that email. That's pretty cool. Being able to navigate your way around Gmail and open and select email messages, that's one of the powerful features here. So let's compose some emails and you can see how quick it would be to send out an email. Compose, TrellPress Enter, press Tab, my productivity note. Body. This would be a personal note that I would send myself, full stop. This is going to my email to Trellcard email address inside of a TrelobardFull Stop. Sleep. So there you see we're able to just dictate our message and create an email in a matter of seconds. Okay, next, let's look at how it works with Excel and Google Sheets. Mainly focus on Google sheets here. Once in a worksheet, you're able to do things like column A, Row five. Copy, row 17, paste, row six, outer border, row seven. Format as currency. Column A, bold. Cell B three, bold. So that just gives you an idea of how it can work with Google Sheets. Now, let's have a look at some of the settings to see what else it could do because what I've shown you here is just a handful of the powerful functionality that this extension has. So we've got to custom shortcuts. Now, these are really great if you want to create your own action. So if you say a specific phrase, it will perform a action. And let's have a look and see what that looks like. So when I say certain word, and you can get quite advanced here, you can even have regex expressions, so regular expressions. You can even adjust it so that it is case sensitive. So when you say a certain word, it would perform a certain action. So you could copy and paste something directly when you have a certain phrase. Correction. So when you notice that the dictation is not getting the word 100% correct, you can then adjust the transcription. So when I say this word, it should be corrected to this. The transcription said, and that would be what you're seeing on screen for the transcription. And here's where you would put in the correction. It should have been this. And you can also do this in certain contexts. So if you only wanted that to happen in Gmail, you could add that as a special context. So those are custom shortcuts. There's also a wake word. So when you say hey lip serve, it would automatically activate. There seems to be a bit of an issue with this, but the guys are working on it. New tabs, plug ins, you're able to do all of these navigation commands. I mean, this is so useful when you're filling out forms on a website. So if you have lengthy forms, you're able to just breeze through them. Copy, paste, cut, all of that, have some context menus for help. Keyboard commands, so you can press any combination of keyboard commands. You can press tab, Enter, all of that. You can have the extension play videos automatically for you, pause them, resume, here are all the modes that we looked at earlier, GML, so these are all the Gmail commands, Google Sheet commands. You can enable these for top sites if you just want to quickly go to one of these websites. And then it has some website specific commands as well. There's also a NIFD set timer function. It's a very basic way to set a timer, and once it is up, it just lets you know through an audio notification. So that is lip surf. And as you can see, this is just a taste of what is possible. The sky is the limit with what you can do. And the main purpose is to use speech to text to dictate and also control your browser to an extent. This is kind of the majority of what I use it for. I use it in Gmail documents or Gmail emails. I use it in documents. Slack messages, that sort of thing. But the nice thing is, it works across all of the websites. An field that is online it's able to work with. So it just has that universal application. And I really couldn't be as productive as I am without this tool. So I highly recommend it and would love you guys to check it out and start playing around with some voice to text technology. All you really need is this free extension. Sure, if you want to have more functionality, there is a paid version, but the free version you can get started with and playing around with it. I'd also recommend maybe having a good microphone or just testing it out with the microphone that comes with your laptop or PC. That should be equally good. But audio is quite important for it to understand the commands properly. So that's an important thing to consider. Aside from that, that brings this lesson to a close. So I hope you got some good tips from this application. And yeah, I want to go out there and give it a try and improve your productivity by using speech detect technology and this lip surf extension. So that's it for this lesson. I'll catch you in the next one. Goodbye.