Nobody wants to arrive at the office in the morning to an inbox full of hideous emails, and then to have those same messages staring at you all the way through the day – it’s a certified motivation and productivity killer if there ever was one. But it’s the reality for most of us, and all too often inbox zero feels more like a distant dream than an achievable goal. Enter the Streak plugin for Gmail and, crucially, its snooze feature. This handy extension has the capacity to bring a clear and uncluttered inbox back within reach – grab it.
Streak is a full-on customer relationship management tool that allows you to track emails and carry out plenty more tricks to streamline your client engagement workflow – but it’s the snooze feature that has the real potential to get you to that inbox-zero nirvana.
The premise is simple. When you receive an email that you can’t instantly file away forever – as you ought to with the likes of updates and notifications from colleagues and clients, which don’t require a reply – but which you can’t take action on right now, with one click of a button you can snooze it for as long as you need to. The email is stored away in a specially created Gmail folder, and resurfaces at the top of your inbox when the snooze time elapses. You can opt for the snooze period of your choice and even enter it in plain, human-speak text (like “in 30 minutes” or “tomorrow at 11am”), which the ever-intelligent Streak understands.
Additional options include the ability to only activate the snooze alarm if nobody replies to the email thread – making it perfect for getting sales enquiries out of your inbox, by prompting you to follow up if the client doesn’t get back in touch (and if they do, their reply will force the email back into your inbox, and onto your radar, anyway). Any time you need to, you can review a list of the emails you’re holding in snooze mode, and pull back to your inbox any that you’re ready to work on sooner than you had initially expected.
Snooze, along with the rest of the Streak plugin, is simple to understand and easy to use, and has the potential to help you better manage your email – and stop it from managing you instead. If it feels like you’re constantly waging war with a never-ending barrage of messages, this is one more tool you might want to consider adding to your productivity arsenal.
If you’re ready to take on the inbox-zero challenge and regain control of your workday, contact us to find out how Google Apps and other innovative tools could help.