Steve Dotto here.
Today, I think we have to spend more time in email.
Email has always been one of the challenges in my life.
I’ve been reading some recent reports that up to 50% of the average white collar worker’s
day is spent buried in email and the average worker in North America checks their 40 times
a day.
So our relationship with our email software had better be good because we’re using it
an often lot and we have to really learn to master the tools within our email software
so we can discover some extra productivity because we obviously lose a lot of time buried
in email.
Now I’m on a bit of an experiment.
Starting last week, I shifted from using a standard email client—I was using Postbox
on the Mac—and I started to use Gmail native in the browser as my email client.
This was based on a buddy of mine who said that he was doing it just fine.
I showed you some CRM tools on our last video relating to Gmail.
So I’ve taken the plunge and I've been living for the last week in Gmail.
So far, I’m not doing too badly but there were a few things that I had to do in order
to make Gmail work for me as my main email software.
I want to work through a few of those steps today for you, if you’re interested in doing
it.
The first thing most of us will need to do is we need to set up Gmail to receive email
from multiple accounts because most of us have more than one email account that we check.
It’s not that difficult a thing but it’s also not super intuitive to do that.
We have to go in and get used to the Settings area within Gmail if you decide that you are
going to start using Gmail as your main client because you will be living in the Settings
area, at least for the first week or so, as you’re setting things up and getting everything
organized.
Now within the Settings area is kind of the skunk works for Google and Gmail.
It’s called Google or Gmail Labs.
This is where they say they are trying crazy and experimental stuff.
Well, it’s not so crazy and while it is experimental, I think they just say experimental
so they don’t have to actually support it if there are problems.
There are all this different tools that you can enable from Labs and I end up using a
few of these in order to allow me to use Gmail as my main software.
The one that we’re going to talk about to start is this Multiple Inbox feature.
You have to go in and you have to enable multiple inboxes.
That will allow us, once you’ve done that, to go into your Settings, go into your Accounts,
and allow you to then add another email address as your own.
That’s what you have to do to add each of the addresses that you want to check your
email for within the unified Inbox within Gmail.
Once you do that, you basically will just go in, put in your server, and put in your
password information.
Once you’ve done that, then you have to decide which your default email is.
In this particular case, default emails refers to what email address most of your email will
be sent from.
You can change that and you can reset the designation at any point if you want to but
for the most part, what email address you want represented as the email you’re sending
email to other people with.
Set that as your default.
Now the other thing that I did—and I’m going to head into my Inbox to let you take
a look at it—is I wanted to be able to make sure that I recognized, just by looking at
my Inbox, which email is coming from which account.
I’ve got a business account, I’ve got my Dotto Tech account, and then I’ve got
a personal account.
I did that through setting up labels and setting up a rule within labels.
Let me show you how we did that.
I’m going to head back into my Settings here for a moment.
Within the Settings, there are filters.
This filter is the one which basically tells the label to appear on my Dotto Tech email.
It is a very simple filter.
I’m going to go in and edit it.
I just set it up so that any email that’s coming in to my business email account has
this label attached.
That’s step one.
It’s a two-step process.
Step two is really easy to do.
You just go in here into the right-hand side of where all of your labels are identified
within the email, the left-hand pane here.
You go to the right side of the left-hand pane and there you click on a little dropout.
That allows you to apply a color to the label.
Once you’ve applied the color to the label, it will then automatically do that for each
email that comes in and voila!
You have the ability to color code and label all of the email as it comes in.
I actually go beyond that.
If I’ve got any purchases coming in, I’ve been putting on these workshops and if someone’s
registering for the workshop, I want to know so that has a nice red label.
I notice it right away so I can monitor that.
Anything important you can add labels to as it comes in to make sure you stay on top of
it.
That's the first thing, labeling and setting up multiple inboxes.
The next thing that I discovered I needed to do as I started to work with it is I use
multiple signatures in my regular email software to be able to send out kind of canned responses
to people.
Especially when I do my radio show, I want to give them the phone numbers of the radio
station, my producers’ contact information, and give them instructions on what we do when
we do an interview so that I don’t have to write an email each time saying this is
the number you call, this is the address of the studio, and this is how long you want
to show up before your interview.
I used the signature in the past to do that.
Within Gmail, you only have a single signature that you can attach to any email address.
Here’s my signature for my main email address.
So I scratched my head a little bit, did a little bit of research on Google, and came
up with this workaround.
It’s actually a pretty elegant workaround.
In some ways, I think it’s better than having multiple signatures.
I had to head back into the Labs and within Labs, they have something called Canned Responses.
When I enabled Canned Responses, as I go to Compose a New Email, I’ve got this little
selection right here underneath the Subject bar and it allows me to choose canned responses.
I can just highlight text and turn it into canned responses if you’re going to be sending
the same email to multiple people and you want to be able to just insert it with a little
personal note.
You can create an on-the-fly canned response.
I’ve created the canned response which is my Radio Details.
When I click on that, you can see what happens is it populates that information into the
email.
So I can write the personal part of the email first, select Canned Responses, add that,
and the email goes off.
That is, I think, a crucial tool in email productivity.
It’s a little bit of a workaround, as I’ve said, but a very elegant workaround.
The next two things that I want to talk about are kind of process-related.
The first is how you go about sorting and archiving your email.
One of the things about using Gmail is they give us a tremendous amount of server space
as a part of our account.
I’ve got a lot of emails that I’ve stored in Gmail and I’m only using 10% to 12% of
the available space.
It’s constantly growing.
Google’s constantly giving us more space so you really don’t need to throw out all
that much email.
You can kind of leave it all there but you don’t want it here in your Inbox.
Moving it into folders is one thing but typically speaking now what I’m doing is I’m just
moving important stuff into folders and then archiving everything else.
Here’s an ad from Costco so it’s not important at all.
Once I’ve read it, I actually use one of the tools, I think it’s one of the Active
Inbox Plus tools, that I actually click and it automatically archives it.
Once it’s moved into the Archive, I can then find it anytime if I need it in the future
just by clicking down on the More side in the left-hand pane.
There you’ll see All Mail.
All of your email that you’ve had and you’ve archived is all there.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s not structured and organized there because you can search
through it.
There’s a very powerful search engine so you can search for it if you need it.
Any important email that you need definitely put into folders, flag, tag, make sure that
you’ve got them in some sort of structure where you can find it by navigating within
your system.
Once you’ve done that, just throw it into the Archive, keep your Inbox almost empty,
and don’t worry about adding too much structure when you put it into the Archive because you
should be able to find it again.
You never really have to throw it out from the Archive because there is plenty of space
within the Gmail servers for us to store as much email as we’re ever going to want.
The last thing that I want to talk about is checking mail.
I had mentioned off the top of this demo that the average white collar worker in North America
checks their email 40 times a day, which is probably too much.
We probably shouldn’t be checking our email that much.
Occasionally, when you’re waiting for something you want to refresh your email, look at it,
and see exactly what’s happening.
In Gmail, you can’t set how often it refreshes.
It does it through some sort of algorithm and the more email you get, the more often
Gmail checks.
Sometimes, you can go 5, 10, maybe 20 or 25 minutes between email checks within Gmail.
As you can see, mine is kind of popping in on a fairly regular basis because I get quite
a bit of email.
If you need to check, refreshing the screen doesn’t recheck for you.
It just refreshes the screen.
If you do need to check your email, you’re going to jump back into Settings.
There, you scroll down
to your Accounts area and then in the Check Mail Account, you can say Check Email Now
so it will manually check your email.
That’s the workaround for checking your email manually.
It’s not very elegant.
It’s not very user friendly but if you do need to check, that is the way to do it.
I’m not sure that Gmail is the perfect tool.
I think most people who live on Outlook are going to be happy in Outlook.
Those of us who don’t use Outlook and live on a Mac, we seem to be on a lifelong search
for a great email solution.
Gmail may not be a great solution, but it is a good solution.
So far, it’s the best one that I’ve been working with personally.
I like Postbox.
I don’t like Apple Mail.
I’ve gotten here and there with Thunderbird.
I’m going to give Gmail a run for another month or so.
I’ll report back if it is the winner, though you’ll certainly know from my demos.
I hope you found this particular conversation today useful.
If you have, please show us some love.
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with that we are talking about.
Sorry, this one was a little on the long side.
I’m Steve Dotto, and we will see you soon.
[END OF VIDEO] Steve Dotto0Primetime Gmail0March 26, 2013
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