Automation for Gmail, News, and iPhone
Issue #6
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Welcome 👋
A hearty welcome to the new people joining this week.
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Now let’s get on with the show. 🚀
Automate Gmail 📧
Automation is available in most of the tools you likely use throughout the day. Relieving yourself of repetitive or mundane tasks allows you to focus on critical work that demands your attention OR allows you to punch-out early to enjoy time with yourself and loved ones. Either way, adding automation frees you. And freedom is good.
Given the volume of email sent in today’s world you may be swimming in it, and not in a Scrooge McDuck kinda way. Email automation may provide the most bang for the buck.
How to Automate Gmail (similar features may be available for your chosen email platform)
Auto-response (or automatic reply): Think of the auto-response you may receive when submitting an online support question. The response confirms receipt and may include additional helpful information. You can do the same. Add an auto-response to your email. Thank the person for their message and direct them to a few different places depending on what they are looking for - FAQ, sales page, Facebook group, Twitter, etc. A comprehensive auto-response can help people help themselves.
Templates: Known as canned responses when originally introduced in 2008, templates are pre-written email templates to insert into a new email draft or an email reply to save time on repetitive messages and maintain consistency.
Signature: Added at the end of your message as a footer, a signature can contain up to 10,000 characters (about 6 printed pages!) but more importantly can include contact information and other items the recipient may find helpful. These could include your photo, social media icons, a link to your blog, a quote. Create one.
Create labels and filters: Labels add organization to your email and filters assign labels (or take other steps). Labels can help identify those emails that require your attention and filters can move (or remove) those emails that do not. (In filters a Send Template option is now available, which brings in the auto-response and template items above.)
Multiple inboxes: This option goes beyond labels and places certain messages in separate inboxes. For instance, you can separate your business email from your personal email. Or you could have all messages with a specific label appear in a separate inbox. You choose.
Snooze: While the snooze on your alarm can sometimes get a bad name, the snooze here is a top-flight player in the email game. By snoozing a message you are essentially adding a reminder for a later date and time. The message comes back into your inbox as appointed.
More instructions on Gmail features
Automate News and Posts 🗞️
Another area ripe for automation is following your favorite blogs and sites. You could rely on the whims of social media algorithms to do this but that’s no way to live your life. Your time and attention is worth more than that. Instead of scrolling through a social media feed or visiting a bunch of websites, you could just open a news reader and begin enjoying the articles and blog posts of writers and creators you love to support. It’s like your own personal newspaper.
Ready to tame your news beast? Here’s a few steps to get you started.
Choose a news reader (My personal choice is Feedly.)
What is RSS and why is it important? (Real quick, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is 90’s technology that allows a site to publish their content to be easily aggregated or pulled into a news reader.)
How to Use RSS Feeds (News readers rely on RSS feeds primarily to gather posts and news.)
Make your own Twitter and Facebook RSS feeds (Automatically capture what you want out of your social media feed.)
Automate iPhone 📱
This is an oldie but a goodie. Using voice commands to instruct that rectangular Internet miracle machine in your pocket, aka mobile phone, can be quite liberating.
A few popular iPhone voice commands (“Hey Siri…”)
Take photo (very handy when it’s cold and you’re wearing gloves)
Take video
Take selfie
Set timer (the one I use the most)
Send text to [recipient name]
When is the next Nuggets game
For Harry Potter fans
Lumos (turn on the flashlight, err torch)
Nox (extinguish the torch)
Accio [app name] (open an app)
More
What I’m Enjoying 💖
Denver Nuggets of the National Basketball Association
Tied for the best record in the association (as of 2/5)
Nikola Jokic, back-to-back MVP winner, is making a solid case for a three-peat
Feedback 🤩
Got feedback? Use the Comment button below (or reply to this email). I’d love to hear from you. Which tech tool is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Leave a comment with all the juicy details.
Share with a friend 💌
If you found value in reading this issue, please share with a friend.
In Case You Missed Recent Posts 📰
📧 Email: Past, Present, and Future/Writing/Organizing & Optimizing
🤖 Google Business Profile, Delete Online Accounts, AI and ChatGPT
🗄️ Visit the archive
Mission 🧾
To provide valuable, actionable information about tech tools to small business owners, entrepreneurs, and organization leaders. I’ll look for the tastiest morsels of useful news and notes to share while you focus on the success of you, your business, your organization.
Until next time.
Take care and be well,
Rob
Tools used in this post
Notion (information gathering)
Substack (newsletter publishing)
Emojipedia (yes, emojis)
Useful!