3 Workspace Templates that Tripled My Productivity
| Google Apps
I think at some point in our lives, someone should have told us the easiest way to create a custom Gmail signature for free is to open up a Google Doc, create a table, insert a logo we want to use, resize it, include our information on the right, change the table border to 0, and copy and paste this into the signature field within Gmail
Back in the signature field you can actually hyperlink this image to another webpage. Super helpful if you decide to add Social Media icons
Pro tips: include an empty line before your closing phrase, and if you create multiple signatures you can select one to be used in new emails, and another when you reply and forward. I also have this option checked so that my signature is included in the email body.
Now that the Smart Chips feature has been rolled out, you can type “@” > Email Draft > and this template pops up. If you had no idea this was possible I’ll link the full Smart Chips video down below
You can continue to use the “@” symbol to add contacts in the to, cc, and bcc fields, include a subject line and email body, click this Gmail icon here, and everything will be automagically ported over to a draft within your gmail
This feature is especially helpful if you’re writing a high visibility email and you’d like your colleagues or manager to look over everything before you send it out
It is essentially a simple to use text expander - for example if I type h and press tab, it replaces that with Hi, the first name of the recipient, exclamation mark
Now, because of this dynamic element - which we will get to in a bit - it’s super useful in situations where I say let’s review this next week 1week > tab, and the specific date 7 days from now, pops up
Or, something we all love to say and hear at work - could I please get that by end of week eow > tab, and the date of this upcoming Friday appears.
All this is possible thanks to the template and variable features within Briskine. For the “in 1 week” template, the shortcut I’ve assigned is “1week” without spaces, and this is the variable I’ve added
Pro tip: by combining a few of these variables, you can easily create multiple cold email templates for different situations that will save you a lot of time in the long run
So I recently received a lot of emails from this Lauren Look promotion, I’ve never signed up for this and unsubscribe is not working. Sometimes, bad actors even change their “from email alias” so just blocking one does not work
What you want to do is to create a filter and identify a set of keywords unique to this series of spam. For example “lauren look” is the key phrase so in my filter, has the words “lauren look” in quotation marks, search to make sure I’m just catching the spam emails, skip the inbox and mark as read, or you can just mark delete directly
Obviously this is not a perfect solution but it’s close since you never have to see those emails hit your inbox again. If anyone watching has a better way to deal with spam you can’t unsubscribe from, let me know in the comments.
This has probably happened to you a lot, an email that has been forwarded countless times and even when you click in, you see a meaningless “FYI” rather than the implication of the email
So, the next time you forward an email, click the button here > Edit Subject, add a one-line summary of the email content and let the recipient know they can read the full thread for more context
Yes that’s right, the next time you compose an email, you can toggle on confidential mode by clicking the lock icon here and setting an expiration date, by which time the email will “disappear” from the recipient’s inbox
Even before the email expires, recipients won’t have the option to forward, copy, print, or download the email and you can even choose to go into the sent folder and revoke access earlier if you want to
Go to your gmail settings > Chat and Meet > enable Google Chat, left side of inbox > Show the Meet Section in the main menu > save changes, then come back to General, and now you’ll see the option to enable the new view. Pro tip, my current theme is the android one at the bottom
So first, I have to say best practice is to always copy and paste without formatting. Whether you’re copying something - CMD/CTRL+C - into gmail, google docs, sheets, or slides - press CMD/CTRL + SHIFT + V to paste without formatting
But what if you’ve already pasted text from a few different sources and the formatting is all over the place? All you have to do is to highlight and press this icon - the T with the line through it - or use the keyboard shortcut CMD/CTRL + \ to clear formatting. It’s that simple
If you use the snooze feature, and you should, you might have noticed that when you click this icon to snooze, or press the keyboard shortcut b, the default snooze until time is 8AM
You can easily change this by going to Google Keep, yes Google Keep, settings > and changing the reminder default in the morning to a time you want, say 9:30am. Click save, go back to Gmail > refresh, and the snooze until time should be updated
If you’ve adopted the Inbox Zero workflow, you already know how to automatically apply the “follow up” label to emails where YOU need to take action. But, what if a system notification reminds me to submit my expense report AFTER I go on my business trip, which is 2 months in the future?
With my…very low maintenance personality, I obviously can’t stand a red “follow up” label in my inbox for 2 whole months. So I would press B, and snooze this email until 1 day after I come back from my business trip, and treat it as a follow up email that week