Between work and recreational surfing, it’s not unusual for people to spend more than 8 hours per day actively engaged with their computers and other devices. If you are a gmail user, one of the things that may have attracted you to that product is ease of use and convenience. However, if you aren’t taking advantage of some of the many plugins that are available for Gmail users, you may be cheating yourself out of a few productivity boosters that can result in your spending less time in front of your computer and more time living your life. Take a look at these Gmail plugins that can help boost your Gmail skills to true ninja level.
Gmail Snooze
You receive an email, and you know immediately, based on the person sending the correspondence or the topic that you will need to block out time to read and respond. So, you ignore it, telling yourself that you will get back to it later. Here’s another example, you receive an email and it’s important but not urgent, and you decide to get back to it later. Then, you receive a few dozen more emails and the email you’ve put off gets buried in your inbox, and you forget about it completely, often to your embarrassment and inconvenience.
The Gmail Snooze utility allows you to hit the snooze button on any email you receive. When you use this feature, the email disappears from your inbox, and only returns after the period of time that you’ve designated has passed. This is a great tool to help you manage your incoming email while never risking your professionalism.
Banana Tag
Sometimes it seems as if emails go into a black hole after you hit send. You don’t know whether or not the email has been received. You don’t know if it’s been opened, and you don’t know if the recipient has clicked on any links inside the email. This makes it hard to know whether or not to follow up on an email, or in a contentious situation to know how to respond to somebody when you don’t know whether or not they have received an email. The result is that you simply have to wait for a response. That is, unless you have BananaTag.
BananaTag lets you know when the recipient opens your email. Even better, it also tells you when any links in your email have been clicked. Here’s the best thing of all, this email tracking happens directly from your gmail inbox. You receive notification whenever any action is taken on the emails that you send.
It should be noted that BananaTag isn’t the only source of this type of email tracking. However, many of the other similar services require logging into a third party website to send and receive email. BananaTag works directly from your inbox.
Key Rocket
Using keyboard shortcuts can make navigating through various gmail tasks stupidly simple. Unfortunately, learning these shortcuts isn’t something that is very intuitive. Then there is the fact that Gmail doesn’t come with a tutorial that covers this. Fortunately, the Key Rocket plugin guides both neophyte and seasoned gmail users in the use of keyboard shortcuts, by presenting a set of available shortcuts depending on what the user is doing. After using Key Rocket for a few days, chances are you will be be able to use the keyboard shortcuts you know to make navigating gmail much easier.
Unsubscribe From Email Lists That Are No Longer Useful With Unroll.Me
Unroll.me is an online tool that helps you to clean up all of your email subscriptions. All you have to do is go to the unroll.me website and enter your gmail address. Then, the tool will scan your email and create a list of all of your email subscriptions. From there, you simply click to unsubscribe, or you can add the subscription to your rollup list. From then on, instead of getting subscription emails throughout the day, you receive all emails from your rollup list, once a day at a time of your choosing. Considering that one of the biggest digital marketing trends is enticing people to subscribe to emails, almost all of us have subscriptions that are cluttering our inboxes.
Save Time With Canned Responses
Do you receive a lot of the same emails addressing the same subjects every day? If so, it might be tempting to simply ignore these emails, or to address them with some canned response. Believe it or not, the canned response is very often the best option. It saves you time that you might waste coming up with something original when being repetitive might be the best option. Thankfully, Google Labs has come up with a great solution. To use this feature, simply add the feature of Gmail labs known as canned responses. Then, when it is appropriate, you can just select the canned response to save the time and energy that you would have spent formulating a response that would have generated the same reaction. To activate this, go into your Gmail settings, click on the “Labs” tab and click to enable canned responses.
Create Email Collaboration With Hiver
Why not use the Hiver plugin to collaborate with your business partners, employees, and co-workers. With Hiver, you can simply create words and phrases that your email will act upon. This way, if emails are tagged as directing specific subjects or are addressed to certain people, the people who you designate as responsible can simply deal with that correspondence. You are simply told who has taken responsibility for each task. As a result, the people on your team are empowered to make tough decisions and to take ownership with customers and clients. A great bonus feature of this – is that it gives you the ability to track your action related any email you receive.
Auto Advance
This is another utility that can be found under the “Labs” tab in Gmail settings. If you’ve been wasting time going from email, back to your inbox, and then into your next email, enabling auto advance will save you both time and clicks. Instead of taking you back to the inbox when you are done looking at an email, Auto Advance takes you directly to the next conversation.
These are just a few tools that can help you boost your Gmail productivity. Take some time to explore what Google Labs has to offer, and what app developers outside of Google have to offer to improve your email performance.
