Stephanie Liu

Survive an Email Avalanche

Companies encourage their hard working employees to reap the benefits of work-life balance, to go on vacation, and take a break from the office every now and then to recharge.

For some of us, getting out of the office isn’t difficult but for the 15% of workers that forfeited their vacation days last year— it is. What makes leaving the office so difficult? One answer that comes to mind is the avalanche of emails that you receive when you get back to the office. Opening your Outlook to find 50+ or even 100+ unread emails waiting for your response can be overwhelming.

Fortunately there’s HitMeLater.com, a cool website created by Philip Kaplan, that lets you hit the snooze button on your emails. Simply forward an email from your inbox to 24@hitmelater.com and they’ll resend the email to you 24 hours later.

Even more helpful, you can swap out the number 24 to any other number or day. For example, if I want an email to be sent back to me two hours later, I just forward the email to 2@hitmelater.com. How easy is that?

So the next time you feel like your drowning in a sea of emails, try HitMeLater to see if it lightens up your workload. I know I will.

(Photo Credit: Philip Kaplan)

Stephanie Liu

BatchBook: Answer to my Blues

Organizing my emails in Outlook is simple. Every client has a separate folder and I use the Outlook wizard to create rules so important emails don’t get caught in a spam filter or get neglected. This helps to keep my inbox free from clutter and more manageable.

What isn’t simple, is trying to organize my contacts. In fact, I’ve been searching for a contact management software that would enable me to do these three things:

  1. Utilize tags to organize contacts
  2. Create targeted email lists
  3. Track conversations easily

Friends and colleagues suggested that I create an excel database or create groups in my Gmail account. Unfortunately, both suggestions wouldn’t allow me to use tags to group contacts together. Plus, tracking conversations in excel is tedious.

Fortunately, I came across Chris Brogan’s post on BatchBook.com and was floored with his review. The BatchBook features met all of my needs. I could organize contacts with tags, generate instant email lists, and track conversations instantly. My favorite features were the ability to add photos and create custom contact fields. Their plans were affordable too. In fact, I signed up for the Baby Blue account to test the waters. If I decide that I need to increase the amount of storage, users, contacts, or SuperTags – I can always upgrade later.

In the end, BatchBook was the solution to my problem. If you’re looking for a robust contact management application, I suggest you take a look at BatchBook. Below is a full breakout of features that they have to offer.

(Photo Credit: BatchBlue.com)