This post shows a nice O365 related plugin called Boomerang that I’ve installed into Outlook that appears to be making my e-mailing business a lot easier. I am in no way affiliated with the developers of this plugin. I just wanted to share this nice email productivity tip as it helped me becoming even more efficiënt with e-mailing and keeping track.
Gmail is my personal favorite
I really love using a central Gmail account along with Google’s Inbox on my iPhone and Mail on my Macbook Pro for all my personal e-mailing needs.
Sending later
For my day job at Valid I use the Outlook – part of Office 2016 for Mac) client to handle e-mailing. Because I don’t work full-time at my day job but I DO work on e-mails flexible throughout the week, I often have emails saved in my Drafts folder in order to send later on them the next Monday morning.
Keeping track
I’ve always known that there are follow-up possibilities and that I can keep track of all the e-mails but I have also found it quite hard to make myself come back to checking up on those e-mail tasks.
I do make it easy for myself by placing all the email correspondence into (sub)maps so I can keep track of communication for specific projects and subjects, but it would be really cool if you had pro-active feedback on reactions to questions that you’ve emailed a couple of days ago, wouldn’t it?
Boomerang: email productivity ++
I by accident stumbled upon the orange Store button in my Outlook (for Mac) client:
Clicking it showed me all the plugins that are available for Outlook. On top of that list was Boomerang with the slogan:
The ultimate email productivity tool. Send later, track responses, schedule meetings, and more!
Sounds promising, right? So I went on and got it going as following:
- I toggled the switch button to “on” and it got installed.
- Then I connected it to my email account*
- I setup some minor localization settings
- All done and get your email productivity boost going for you!
*: You have to give it rights to email on behalf of you and track your schedule. Check your company’s privacy and/or security policy to find out if you are allowed to do this
Loving it!
I’ve only started working for a few days with Boomerang, but I already love how it makes my days easier and boosts my email productivity as it:
lets me schedule a mail for later (the image shows the quick time options and the possibility to specify a custom time option)- tracks if the people have read the email if you enable that for your current email
- lets your email contacts select the best time out of all your agenda’s availability slots that you can include in the email (!) so you can plan an event with a single email
- has the possibility to remind you in X days if nobody responded to your email and the included requests or questions. Talking about proactive reminders
These are just a few of the things that are in there and that I actually got to try out. I am really enthusiastic, so I thought I’d share it with you.
Hope it will save you some time too, and leave more time to code some awesome Mobile solution!
