You’re chained to your inbox. You know it isn’t healthy, but you have clients to keep happy and email communication is essential. You’d love to be able to just focus on your work – without incessant notifications and the nagging fear of missing an urgent message from one of your valued clients.
You can’t possibly be both responsive and unplugged at the same time. Right?
Wrong!
Listen up Gmail users, using built-in autoresponder and forwarding features you can manage your inbox in a way that:
- Gives your valued clients an immediate, helpful response
- Provides you with notifications for urgent messages (even when you’re away from your computer)
- Helps you focus so you can be more productive and better serve your clients
- Makes you look like a total professional badass
Overview
Ready for the details? Great!
In a nutshell, you will be using Gmail’s vacation responder 24/7/365 to provide everyone with a quick, informative response. Then, Gmail will filter messages with “urgent” in the subject line and forward them directly to your phone as a text message.
Step 1: Autoresponder Setup
First things first, let’s setup your autoresponder. We will use Gmail’s vacation responder feature without an end date.
Note: Gmail has a built-in mechanism for limiting the number of times someone sees your autoresponder, so your clients won’t get annoyed receiving the same message every time they email you.
Your autoresponder message should be concise yet informative. Some suggested elements to include in your message:
- Links to helpful pages on your website (work with me, featured blog posts, scheduling, etc.)
- Answers to frequently asked questions
- Your office hours and when a personal response should be expected
Most importantly, you need to provide instructions for getting an urgent message to you. You should determine a trigger word that the person will include in the subject line if they need to reach you ASAP.
Now it’s time to setup the autoresponder.
- In your Gmail account, click the gear icon then select “Settings” from the menu.
- You will be in the “General” tab by default, scroll all the way to the bottom where you’ll see the ”Vacation responder” section.
- Click the “Vacation responder on” radio button.
- Insert today’s date in the “First day” field.
- Confirm “Last day” is unchecked.
- Insert a subject in the “Subject” field and your message in the “Message” field.
- Confirm the two checkboxes beneath the message field are unchecked.
- Click “Save Changes” and you’re done!
Want to see it in action? Send me an email!
Step 2: Text Message Forwarding Setup
Next, we have to set up Gmail to be able to forward messages to your phone as a text.
- Check this post to determine the address to use for sending a text based on your carrier (from the SMS gateway domain column): https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/how-to-send-a-text-from-your-email-account/
- In your Gmail account, click the gear icon then select “Settings” from the menu.
- Click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.
- Click the “Add a forwarding address” button in the “Forwarding” section.
- Enter the address from step 1 and click “Next” then click “Proceed” and “OK.”
- You should receive a text asking you to verify the forwarding address setup. When you receive the text, type the confirmation code into the field in this same section then click “Verify.”
All done here! Time for the final step.
Step 3: Email Filter Setup
Now we need to set up the filter that will forward messages to you via text.
- In your Gmail account, click the gear icon then select “Settings” from the menu.
- Click the “Filters and Blocked Addresses” tab.
- Click the blue “Create a new filter” link.
- Type you trigger word(s) (as specified in your autoresponder) into the “Subject” field.
- Click the light gray “Create filter with this search >>” link.
- Check the “Forward it to” checkbox and select the text message address you just set up forwarding.
- Click the blue “Create filter” button.
All done! Now, send an email to yourself using the trigger word in the subject line to make sure it’s all working.
Drawbacks
Everything, no matter how perfectly magical it seems, has at least a couple negatives. If you decide to implement this system keep in mind the following:
- You will receive bounce-back emails when your autoresponder sends a message to a no-reply message. Annoying, but nothing that you can’t quickly delete. (Or set up a filter to remove them from your inbox!)
- Clients (and family) will abuse this power. You won’t be chained to your inbox anymore, but you may receive not-so-urgent text messages in the middle of the night. (For this I recommend using your phone’s do not disturb settings.)
Thoughts?
This is the way that I’m currently managing my inbox and it has reduced stress so much.
What do you think about this setup? Are you going to try it out? I’d love to hear your tips for breaking the inbox chains, without missing urgent messages.