Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m somewhat surprised because I have just come back from a road trip.
I was at Boston, actually at Cape Cod, delivering a mastermind to a group of really intelligent
people all about productivity.
What blew me away is how they were blown away by some of the most basic, simple things that
I thought everybody knew about personal productivity in technology.
I think I just sit too close to the topic all the time so I forget that people that
out there doing their real work on an ongoing basis, doing their real job, don’t have
time to dive into IT the way I do.
So today, I’m determined to take you back to basics.
Let’s go back and take a look at what I consider to be the 5 main reasons that you
should consider using Gmail as your prime email client.
That’s today on DottoTech.
All right, I’ve got to thank my good friend, Sue B. Zimmerman, the Instagram gal.
She is an awesome hostess.
She put a webinar.
She had a little forum, a conference called Sale to Your Success, which I attended.
It was awesome and on the backside of that, she invited me to join a lot of her community
and put on a productivity mastermind.
We were just going to look at some basic simple things.
We were going to look at email overload and we were going to look at Evernote.
I thought that’s great and I looked forward to it.
But I was really concerned that they were going to get great value out of the presentation
that I was giving because they were going to take time out of their day, they were coming
out to Cape Cod, they were spending money.
You want to make sure you give people value.
So when I started in on my Gmail part of the presentation, which was just talking about
using Gmail as the basis for your email software, what really took me aback was how surprised
they were with some of the things that I considered to be basic features and it opened my eyes
to the fact that when you spend time in the productivity space the way that I do, the
tools and the features become second nature.
When you spend time doing your job, the tools can be a little bit mysterious because it’s
not your job to know how they work; it’s your job to make them work so actually diving
in and knowing what the different things will do for you that can be sometimes a bit of
a mystery.
So let’s step back.
It’s not that I love Gmail that much.
I don’t think Gmail is the be-all and end-all.
Do I think it’s the best actual email client?
Probably not.
But it’s often the best choice.
I’m going to give you the five reasons that I think it’s the best choice today.
So let’s start with reason number one.
The first tool that people don’t seem to know that they always have at their fingertips
is the ability to open multiple accounts or multiple email addresses in Gmail.
Your existing POP or your existing IMAP email account that you are say accessing in Outlook
or some other client, you can actually import that into Gmail and be able to access all
those different accounts at the same time.
So let me show you very quickly, the process that you go through to do that.
With so much that goes on in Gmail, we start under this gear icon right here in the upper
right-hand side, which is the Settings.
Going into the Settings opens a browser window with all of your Gmail settings available
to you.
There are a lot of settings.
This is one of the challenges I think of Gmail.
Even though it’s free, it’s not, not complex.
It’s got a lot of features, a lot of buttons and a lot of places you go so some of the
dedicated email clients might seem a little easier to use just because the tools are more
at your fingertips.
It’s kind of better thought out as far as the ergonomics goes.
And they are probably a lot easier to use in a lot of ways but they don’t do the things
that we want to do in Gmail.
They don’t give us the kind of ubiquity and the other features that I will be talking
about in a few moments.
So it’s worth learning to navigate our way through these different menus.
Now in order to setup multiple accounts, you’re ultimately going to go into your Accounts
and Import area here, which is going to setup for you to have multiple email addresses.
But before you do that, you have to pop over into the Labs and enable something called
Multiple Inboxes right here.
This allows your Gmail account to access at the same time multiple inboxes.
So you’ve just got to go through and enable that.
Once you’ve done that, you click on the Accounts and Import tab here and down here
you go and you create and import a new email address.
Most of the time you’re going to be doing It down here in this one from using POP3 and
that’s just the old school email address that you have on your server.
So it’s a pretty straightforward process.
You add a POP email account you own.
It can be frustrating even though it’s simple.
You type in the email address and follow your way through the steps.
You’ll have to put in your password.
It will try and find the server for you automatically.
There’s the odd time that you’re going to have to kind of work through a few different
issues getting your email address imported but it’s worth the effort because once you
have your email address imported here, then your Gmail account will pull down email from
all of your different accounts.
Now we’ll use things like tags.
You can see most of my emails comes to one account because you can see just by the tagging
it’s all coming from my main DottoTech account.
But you could add labels and folders that will sort the emails so you can quickly identify
which account it’s coming from, based on the color of tag as it comes in.
I’m not going to dive into that right now because that is an extra feature but it’s
not one of the most compelling things reasons to be using Gmail and I have other videos
on that so if you’re watching all of my videos, you’ll certainly be able to see
that as well.
So number one is we can import multiple accounts and bring them all together.
Now one comment that came up from one of the people at my conference at the mastermind
was a full stop on Gmail because they didn’t like how Gmail nested the emails together,
the reading options and they never took a look inside, once again going back to the
area in Settings where we have multiple options.
Now, I’ve got my Gmail setup right now for nested email and I don’t really like it.
That’s where you have kind of one subject and it includes all of the follow-up emails
within that.
It does do a good job of cleaning up the number of messages in our email inbox but sometimes
if you’re dealing with a long thread, you can get lost within the thread.
We all know that.
It’s all happened to all of us.
So if you want to, you can just go here in the Conversation view, once again in the Settings
area, and turn conversation view off.
Now every time you make a change here in the settings in Gmail, you have to remember to
scroll to the very bottom of the screen and you’ve got to save the changes.
Once I’ve done that, I should be able to go back in and now where I had nested conversations,
I actually have more email messages in my inbox than I did before but all of the nested
conversations are now independent emails which are a little bit easier for me to manage and
deal with.
Now please do not judge me.
I do have 160 messages in my inbox, which is outrageous as far as the number of messages
but I have been on the road for a week.
I’m just back today recording this demo before I’ve actually cleaned up my inbox
because email is a second priority to me.
I wanted to get a video in the can today.
So after I’m done with you right now, I’ll be inspired and I’ll go back in and my email
will be down to a white space in the bottom in no time.
So don’t sweat my 160 messages.
I’m not sweating at this point.
The next thing I wanted to talk to you about is the different sorting options that they
have.
This is an area that Gmail when they launched this feature, there was a lot of backlash.
A lot of people didn’t like it.
Personally, I love this feature.
You see here along the top of my Gmail inbox, I have a variety of different tabs.
What Gmail does is because Gmail comes from Google and they are the search people, they
know how to categorize information as it flows.
They’ve looked at more email than anybody in the planet so they recognized what’s
primary email, what are the ones that you should be dealing with, the people you write
back and forth to, the most important messages.
They recognize what’s coming from social networks like Google+ and Facebook and Twitter.
They recognize what’s a promotional thing, “Hey, Steve buy this.”
And they recognize what our updates, which are things like newsletters and things like
that.
So they recognize the different categories of information and they automatically sort
all of our email into those categories.
So typically speaking when I check my email, I just look at in the primary email on a kind
of every time I check email basis and every once in a while, I poke my head into the social
and I see what’s going on here.
But for the most part, I’m getting the feedback from social from people posting on my wall
and stuff like that when I actually visit my Facebook account or when I go onto Twitter
so it’s not as important for me to have it here although it’s a nicety to have it.
The promotions I hardly ever look at.
Those are people selling me stuff for the most part and I do go in and look every once
in a while, just to check it.
Maybe once a day, I’ll look and see if there’s anything important because sometimes you will
get an important email accidently into one of these areas and when you do, when it’s
something that you actually want to have in your main inbox, you just grab it, drag it
across and see what it says, “Move one conversation.”
It will then move it and if I say yes, I want to move everything that comes from the Mac
Station Marketing Department into my inbox, now that email will always arrive in my primary
inbox, which you can see is also important email.
You can name it something different.
It’s the same with the updates.
Now how you enable this is once again under said gear icon.
We go into the gear icon and you configure your inbox.
By configuring the inbox here, that opens up a little dialog box here or a little pop-out
that allows you to turn on or off these sorting tabs.
Now a lot of people in the internet marketing hated these sorting tabs because it meant
that their newsletters and email ended up in the updates or promotion folder unless
people moved them across.
Personally, I love it.
If I give you good enough value in the email that I send out to you, like my promotional
email, that you read it all the time and you move it into your inbox?
As far as I’m concerned, that’s fantastic.
If you just want to see it occasionally in the update area, that means I’m not doing
as good of job as I could possibly with my content in my newsletter.
At any rate for the end user, this sorting feature is an absolutely brilliant concept
that I have really taken to.
If you don’t have Gmail, if you decided you’re not using Gmail and you’re going
to stay in Outlook, you can add the same kind of functionality using a third-party tool
like a SaneBox or something like that.
The next thing I wanted to talk about is calendar integration.
Now one of the reasons that I originally left AppleMail and started to look at Gmail seriously
was AppleMail’s integration with calendaring apps sucked.
So many of our appointments are generated by email so having to go into the calendar
and manually entering all of the information was absolutely insane as far as I was concerned.
Now you will find that in Gmail, your calendar integration comes in a variety of different
ways.
Sometimes as you read an email, if the syntax is proper and people have sent you a time
and suggestion within the email there will be actual blue underline underneath the date
and if you just click on that, you can automatically add it to your calendar.
But even if that doesn’t work because it’s kind of one of the mysteries why it works
sometimes and why it doesn’t, even when it doesn’t work, take a look here.
My dentist is reminding me that I have an appointment coming up on October 21st.
Now theoretically, this should have highlighted for me and I should be able to navigate to
it directly but I can’t.
So instead of that, I can go under the More menu here and I can create an event.
This means that it takes the email and it references it into the calendar appointment.
I create the appointment right away.
When I look at the appointment in my calendar—I’ll just save this and I’ll show it to you in
the calendar—when I save it, it is—let’s go to the proper calendar place here, it’s
next week, it should be saved Tuesday—Sorry it’s 21st.
Oh, I’m looking in early October.
21st of October, there it is, my appointment reminder.
If I click on that, it now brings up the text of the email so that I have all of the information
there.
Booya!
I just absolutely love that feature.
And speaking of integration, when you’re in your Gmail app in the browser, you’ve
always got access to this little tool right here, see this tool here which says apps?
You’ve always got access to Google Drive, your calendar and other Google services so
the integration with your entire world is pretty great here as well with using Gmail.
Now the next thing that I wanted to talk to you about is the add-ons that we have within
Gmail.
Now there are two add-ons that I recommend everybody use that has Gmail.
The first is called Boomerang.
You can try it out for free and you can use it to a certain extent for free in a light
form and then you can upgrade to the paid version but what it does is it allows you
to manage your email in a variety of ways.
The first is if you have a message in your inbox that you don’t want to deal with right
now but you want to deal with in the future, rather than leaving it in your inbox, you
can Boomerang that email.
Send it out of your email, have it kind of sit there in cyberspace for a little while
and then return at a predetermined time so that it’s not top of mind.
It’s not bothering you.
Similarly if you assign a task to a co-worker, you forward an email to them, you can set
up a Boomerang notification to let you know when they reply if they haven’t replied.
So you can say in three days if they haven’t replied to this, remind me.
That works great for customers or co-workers.
But what I find also to be kind of the magic sauce in boomerang is you can schedule.
Are you one of those people that does their email at 11:30 at night sometimes?
If you start sending your email at 11:30 at night a couple of things happen.
I don’t mind you doing it at 11:30 at night, that’s your own personal choice.
But look at what it says to the world.
It says I’m available at 11:30 at night if somebody receives an email from you at
11:309 at night and suddenly, they get engaged in a conversation.
One of the participants in my mastermind was a realtor and she says she replies to email
all the time at 11:00 at night so I recommended to her that she reply at 11:00 at night, get
it off of her chest, kind of get it out there but use this Boomerang feature right here
to send it later and not to send this message at 11:00 at night but send it at 6:30 tomorrow
morning.
They don’t have to know that you’re not an early riser but rather you’re late to
bed and it’s a far more appropriate time to engage in a conversation at 7 or 8 in the
morning by email than it is continuing through late into the night.
So you can acknowledge and you can deal with all of the details.
The main reason she wants to reply is to get it off her shoulders.
She can do that and at the same time she can take care of her client and not get sucked
in to a long conversation.
The other tool that I use an awful lot is Rapportive.
Rapportive allows me to take a look at any—No, he doesn’t have much of a social profile.
Poor Bill, he doesn’t have a lot of social profile.
He’s a great guy, not a lot of social profile.
So let’s go up to Lou.
I met Lou at a conference.
He’s a great YouTube guy.
So when I click on an email coming from Lou, I see here I get the social context.
With Rapportive, the tool Rapportive, I can immediately add him to my circles in Gmail
and I can see other information depending on how connected I am with him.
If I click here on Show Details, it will show all the emails that I had from him, to him
so I get all sorts of contextual information based on the social profile of the person
who I’m having a conversation with and depending on how many ways you’re connected.
I’m not connected with LinkedIn with Lou yet but if I was I would see that information
coming through.
Actually, Rapportive was purchased by LinkedIn so we’re going to see a lot of additional
features but it’s a great way to add social context as you communicate with people through
Gmail.
The last thing I wanted to talk about as so far as the last feature—I haven’t kept
count but I think I’ve gone through four main features—the last one is really the
biggest and that’s the ubiquity of Gmail.
Because Gmail is a cloud-based service, as soon as I get a new notebook computer or a
new tablet or a new phone, all I do is sign into my Google Account and my entire Gmail
account is available to me instantly and it’s the same on all platforms.
So you’re working with the same email if you’re on your notebook, when you move to
your desktop, back to your tablet.
You’ve got the same access to the exact same content.
Nowhere is that more relevant than when we are on our phone.
If we go back and we take a look at my Gmail account right here—let’s just put it back
into my inbox—you can see I’ve got social promotions updates, I’ve got a certain amount
of email, I’ve got my newest email her in my inbox.
When I go in, I open my Gmail on my smartphone, I see the exact same email down to the same
color coding.
If I click here on the side just because the screen is obviously smaller, I have the same
folders that I can store things in.
I have access to all the same accounts.
The same email addresses that I want to send and receive from are all available to me right
there from the phone.
This ubiquity of service with your email is absolutely huge.
You won’t know how valuable it is until the day that your main computer hard drive
crashes and while you are busy going through a recovery process of all of your backed up
files and all of those other things, as soon as you get that new notebook or as soon as
your new hard drive is installed on your old notebook, as soon as you fire up a web browser,
fire up chrome, sign into Gmail or sign into your Google account, you’ve got back in
business for all of your email, all of your calendar and all of your contacts, it’s
just there and all of your stored documents on Google Drive, that’s the moment when
you say “Wow, for all of the extra hassle that I went through, dealing with Gmail and
a Google Account, it was worth it for this moment.”
You never know when that’s going to come.
It might never come but it’s absolutely worth it when that moment comes.
This was a bit of a long demo, wasn’t it?
But it’s good to kind of get back in the saddle, get back in the studio and get recording
again after being on the road for the better part of the week.
I hope you found a lot of value in today’s video.
If you have, there are three ways that you stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
First, please subscribe to our channel.
Second, please sign up for our newsletter.
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If you visit my Patreon page, you’ll learn what crowd-funding is.
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And with that, until next time.
Have fun storming the castle!