In any business, productivity is an understated necessity.  Here is an insight into how the Wilderness Agency team stays on top of our Emails, schedule, and daily tasks.

• Go to your Gmail account.  Then in settings, under the general tab, set the number of conversions per page to 100 for optimal usage.
• Further down the settings page, set Undo Send to 30 seconds.  This setting allows you more time to cancel any accidental messages or un-send an email to add attachments that you forgot.
• Set the default reply behavior to: Reply All.
• Show the “Send and Archive” button for your emails to efficiently clear out your inbox while you send replies.  This ensures unnecessary emails aren’t clogging up your inbox.
• Archive: go to previous older conversations
• Save changes at the bottom of the page.
• Settings, Advanced, Enable auto-advance
• Enable canned responses.

The goal is to go to bed with less than twenty emails in your Inbox.

You can also label and filter emails to clear up more of your inbox.

• Copy the email address that you wish to have filtered and paste it into the Search box.
• Click the drop-down arrow
• Create Filter
• Apply a Label – create new or use an old one
• Never send to Spam
• Click apply to previous conversations

Using Gmail and Google Calendar improves productivity throughout the day.  Check your emails twice a day.  Block out time on your calendar for an hour total to do such, so you’re not continually interrupted by emails and feeling the need to check them all day.  No one needs to live in their email all hours of the day.

Google Calendar

Your calendar is your way of being able to handle fire drills, and schedule out what you need to get done that week.

“If the task takes you ten minutes or less to do, do it now.  If it takes over ten minutes, put it on your schedule.”  + Richard Kaiser

Boomerang

Boomerang is an incredibly helpful extension you can add to Chrome and Gmail.  You can install it in your browser and use it to improve your email responsiveness and to schedule emails for a later time.

If you don’t receive a response, you can have a notification occur in your inbox a certain amount of days or weeks later.  At that time, you may send the recipient another message.

Google frequently makes updates that make their Gmail and Calendar more useful tools.  With all of these settings in place, your productivity will go up as you reduce the amount of time you spend on emails and interruptions throughout the day.  Time to focus on your true goal of running your business.