Streamlined Boomerang and Send Later Menus

The “At a specific time” window is now integrated into the menu. We hope that this will make it easier for you to specify a custom time and reduce a couple mouse clicks for you.

Track responses from the Boomerang menu — not just while sending a message.

You can now track response to any message – in your inbox, sent mail, or anywhere else – and Boomerang it only if you don’t get a response. This was one of the most popular feature requests from Boomerang customers.

Did you know there’s a Boomerang menu at the top right of the Gmail screen?

It’s now a drop down menu, including ways for you to view and manage your scheduled messages, and tell your friends about Boomerang.

You can also now specify a custom date and time to track responses to a message you are sending. Before you were limited to choose one of the default time options, now you can choose any date, time to your heart content!

Improved support for multiple accounts sign-in.

My favorite feature of this update is that Boomerang no longer requires me to select which account I want to use every time I switch between my Gmail and Google Apps email addresses. It knows which account I am in and maps the right account.

Manage Boomerang page improvements

We added links to open up individual scheduled messages in new browser windows.

I’ve been working on a system to streamline handling the stack of cards for quite some time, and I think I’ve finally hit on one that works. The new system:

• Helps me make sure I contact everyone I want to follow up with
• Helps me do it quickly enough so I remember why I want to talk with them
• Clears the stack of business cards off my desk
• Saves me time
• Keeps my perfectionist instinct from kicking in

It’s been quite effective for me. Here’s how it works, in traditional SEO-optimized style.

1. Make sure that the stack of business cards in front of you is actually the stack of business cards you want to deal with.

Just kidding, we haven’t outsourced our blog to

The Content Farm

just yet

First, you’ll need a couple tools to help you get started

• Canned Responses from Gmail Labs
• CardMunch from LinkedIn (iPhone is available today, Android is coming soon, I hope!)
• Boomerang for Gmail (full disclosure, we make this one)

Got them all wired up? Great! We’re ready to start cranking through the stack.

1. Create your Conference X Canned Response. Compose a new draft message that will say all the generic things you want to say to everyone you met. Stuff along the lines of “it was great to meet you at Conference X” and a reminder about who you were in case they forgot should go in here. Instead of sending it, use the Canned Responses lab to save it for later. We’ll be adapting this message for all of our follow-ups.
2. Sort the business cards you collected. I find that using four categories works best for me: VIP, Useful, Marginal, and Unhelpful. VIPs are people who I would be a fool not to contact: potential partners who could offer company-changing partnerships, VCs who we’d like to work with, top tier or especially relevant press contacts, and the like. VIPs also include anyone who I would like to ask for something specific.Useful cards belong to folks who I found interesting at the event but who aren’t obviously going to move the needle for our company: folks who work at companies in our space, people who were especially interesting to talk with, service providers who offer services we need immediately, or people who could connect us to someone helpful.

   Marginal cards belong to people who I would like to contact if I have time. Other entrepreneurs who are working on areas outside our domain, people who could be helpful months or years out into the horizon, most service providers, and tire-kicking VC types all fit into this category.
   The final category are people who are explicitly unhelpful. People who I know will waste a lot of my time, who want to impose an agenda, wantrepreneurs, and negative people fall into this category.

3. Go through the VIP cards. Grab the first card off the VIP stack. Open a new message in Gmail, insert the canned response, and customize it to the specific person you are contacting. Reference something you talked about at the conference, and explain why you are contacting them. Include one clear ask in the message if you have one – and since this stack is for your VIPs, you probably do. Keep the message short and to the point, just enough to make it clear how you’d like to proceed and remind them how you met.

   Once you’re done customizing the response, you’ll want to add their email address into the To: field (secret tip: this keeps you from accidentally sending a message before it’s ready!), save the draft, and set up a reminder to track their response to the message. Check the box that asks Boomerang to bring the message to your Inbox if you don’t hear back. Set the time appropriately – I usually give 4 days – and send the first message off.

   Finally, when you’ve sent the message, fire up CardMunch on your phone. Take a picture of the business card, and in about 10 minutes, you’ll have all the person’s contact information transcribed automatically for you. It will be on your phone whenever you need it, along with a picture of the business card itself, and you won’t need to sift through a giant stack of cards the next time you need to contact that person.

   Once the transcribing is done, you’ll get a push notification that the contact is complete. You can then edit the contact and Add the Notes field, in case it’s unclear from just the contact information and a picture of the card why this person was important.Wash, rinse, repeat until you’ve handled all your VIPs. It’s most effective to follow up with people within 24 hours of when the conference ended, so make sure you get through this stack as fast as you can! Then take a break, and move on to the next batch.

4. Go through the Useful cards. In general, I handle these cards much the same way as the VIP cards. However, for most of these cards, I will have either no explicit ask, or an ask that is less impactful. It’s less important to get these messages off quickly, so I typically use Boomerang to schedule contact emails to go through over next couple days.

   Just customize the canned response, save the message as a draft, and use Boomerang’s Send Later function to send the message in a little while. I find the “At a random time before 5pm today” menu option gets a heavy workout here, so that I never get deluged with a giant pile of responses to my messages at any one time.After sending the message, I Munch the card and throw it out.

5. If time permits, send contact emails to the Marginal cards. I’m usually about 50/50 on going through the Marginal pile. I’ll pick as many at random as I have time to contact, and schedule messages to go out to them in 2-3 days, once I’ll have already scheduled meetings or taken action with the people in the higher-priority category. The rest of the cards just get Munched even if I don’t have time to contact them, because you never know when that person could be exactly the person you need to see.

   In general, if someone in this category contacts me, I’ll take a meeting because they thought it was worth the time to reach out. Most of them never do.

6. Throw out the pile of Unhelpful cards. It’s not worth it to give these people an excuse to contact you. If they reach out, politely pass on their invitation to “grab coffee” or the like. If they’re people you explicitly don’t want to meet or talk with again, you’re under no obligation to let them soak up your time.
7. After 4 days, politely reach back out to VIPs who didn’t get back to you. Since you used Boomerang to track responses, you’ll have a couple emails in your Inbox that did not get a reply. Reach out again – you can politely say that you wanted to make sure they received the message, or that it didn’t get lost in the spam, or just repeat that it was great to meet them.

   About 2/3 of the time, I find that they weren’t trying to ignore me, they just were busy, and the second email solves the problem. In the other case, if they don’t reply to email #2, I typically don’t follow up again.

There you have it! 7 steps that have helped me don my cape as a master of following up after conferences. Remember: if you’re not going to build any relationships after a conference, why bother going?

We will update more info on what impact this outage has on scheduled messages very soon.

Our service is was unavailable starting 4/22 morning because our hosting provider, Amazon AWS, is having widespread outage that affected many web services. The AWS outage started yesterday and they still haven’t restored their service. We weren’t impacted yesterday and thought we were safe but they took us down this morning.

We advise users to manually send messages scheduled with Boomerang for now. To check if a scheduled message is already sent, please look in Sent Items folder. If it’s not there, please send it manually. You can find the scheduled messages in Boomerang-Outbox.

We’re working on restoring the service and we’ll let you know when it’s back up.

Thank you for your patience and we’re really sorry.

-Baydin Team

The list of requirements for a high-quality to do list for me (in rough priority) are:

• Runs in Windows
• Create a new task with one keyboard shortcut (ideally the enter key)
• Accessible via iPhone
• Supports multiple lists
• Somewhat attractive and somewhat elegant
• Rearrange Tasks

Has anyone found a great app like this?

We’ve tried Remember the Milk (multiple lists support sucks), Google Tasks (works OK, but has some quirks, and native app would be better), Tudomo (no web/iPhone access, plus expensive), FruitfulTime (entering a new task is a 3-step process, total dealbreaker). Since we build Outlook addins, we’d use Outlook, but we can’t get to the tasks in the cloud. 

Image via Wikipedia

It’s already 11 AM, and you’re staring into the monitor with your eyes glazed over. There are still 21 messages in your inbox, and none of them are compelling. So instead, you decide to read a little bit of news and catch up on how the Red Sox did last night.

Next thing you know, it’s lunchtime, and there are still 21 unread messages in your inbox.

We’ve all been there, and that’s part of why we included a special structured procrastination tool in Boomerang.

Good procrastination vs Bad procrastination

Procrastination is like cholesterol – there’s a good kind, and a bad kind.

The real problem isn’t that we can’t face dealing with any of these messages. It’s that the number of them is overwhelming, especially since many of them require at least a couple minutes worth of yak shaving to get them finished.

At this point, we can either fall into the trap of “bad procrastination” and go check out some links on the web, or we can use “good procrastination” to help us get rid of some of the less-important or more annoying email messages for a while, so we can focus on the more valuable and easier messages first. 

Here’s how Boomerang can help

Just right-click the one of the low-priority emails that you want to deal with later, hover over the Boomerang menu, and choose to bring the message back at a random time.

Use Boomerang to bring the message back before 5pm today, within a week, or sometime in the next month. Boomerang will return the message to your inbox, unread and flagged, for you to work on some undetermined but bounded time later. That way, instead of dealing with 21 messages all at once, you can take care of each one individually.

Of course, the messages are still accessible, right there in the Boomerang folder. So if you find yourself a few extra minutes, you can work on them right away.

It’s all about willpower

Scientists have discovered that the root cause of procrastination is often that people have only a limited amount of willpower. Clearing out some of the messages that you don’t want to deal with right away can make it easier to get your to-do list under the threshold of how much willpower you have right now.

You can deal with the other messages later, after your willpower has had time to build back up. Try using Boomerang for structured procrastination today (it’s free to try), and discover a better way to procrastinate.

The analyst firm is ZapThink, and their focus has been on enterprise SOA and cloud computing initiatives.  They are now taking a deeper look at the startup ecosystem – both describing how startups can create value for enterprises and helping startups themselves figure out how to position themselves to get larger companies as customers and form partnerships. 

They are beginning their work with startups with a new report format called ZapTakes.  ZapTakes are quick one-page synopses of promising startups.  They describe the problems the startups are tackling and how their solutions work at a high level.  Based on a conversation with the founders and some time spent with the products, they describe the areas in which the startups show the most promise and the key areas where they need to improve. 

Baydin was featured in the first ZapTake, which was published this morning. 

According to Jason, “Baydin (www.baydin.com) targets the information overload problem so prevalent in organizations today by helping individuals manage the information in their email inboxes and on their corporate portals.” 

To read more, get the full report here:
http://www.zapthink.com/2010/04/01/baydin-email-collaboration-productivity-enhancer/

We think it’s a pretty reasonable summary for such a short format.  Of course, we think the technology Baydin’s working on has 6-lightbulbs of game changing potential (since we’re totally revolutionizing the way people search for information inside the firewall), but we’ll give ‘em a pass on that

Since they’re just launching this new format, the report is available for free.  If you’re an enterprise or an investor looking to learn more about startups that are poised to make a big impact, this is a good place to start.  If you’re part of a startup that wants to be featured in one of these reports, we’re happy to make intros to the folks at ZapThink. 

Image via Wikipedia

When I need to write an e-mail where I need to get the content right (or want to start a blog post), I get very worried about making it come out right the first time.  I spend all the time I’m supposed to spend writing wordsmithing the first few sentences, and it takes forever to get anything done. 

One of the best ways I’ve found to get stuff written FAST is to close my eyes and dictate a first draft into the computer.  Since I’m talking instead of writing, it does not feel as important to get it perfect.  And since I look away from the screen, I get the entire first draft out in a single burst, without spending any time editing until I am done writing. 

And best of all, you can do it for free, if you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7.  Both these versions of Windows come with built-in speech recognition that is surprisingly accurate (about or better than 90% for me).  Better yet, it integrates directly with Outlook, so you can draft email right inside Outlook with your voice. 

To get started, just click your start menu, go to Programs—>Accessories—>Ease of Access—>Windows Speech Recognition.  Go through the brief, 10m long tutorial, and then start writing a new email in Outlook.  Turn on dictation, and say whatever you like.  When you’re finished, just go back through to edit the handful of mistakes, and your email will be all set. 

Windows Speech Recognition also lets you control your computer exclusively with your voice (for example, say “File Menu, New” to open the File Menu and click New).  I find those features much less helpful than the dictation, but your mileage may vary.

One other place that dictation is even more helpful is when trying to write an email on a phone.  Dragon provides a free dictation app for the iPhone that works really well.  I find that, even with not-quite-perfect accuracy, it’s much faster to dicate emails than write them on the iPhone keyboard.

Dictation has come a long way since the 90s.  Give it a try! 

In that case, you want to go ahead and write the message and have Outlook worry about delivering it when you want it sent.  We have had several of our customers ask us to build a plug-in that will allow them to do this. Fortunately, Outlook already provides that functionality, called Delayed Delivery.  Here’s how to take advantage of it.

In Outlook 2007

To delay delivery of a message in Outlook 2007, open a new message, and click on the Options tab in the ribbon — as highlighted in the screenshot below.

Click the delay delivery button, and specify the time where you would like Outlook to send your message message in the dialog box that pops up.

Now, just close the dialog to return to your message.  Write whatever you want to say, and when you are finished, click the send button.  Outlook will keep the message in your Outbox until the time you specified, then send it.

Remember, though, Outlook can only send email when it is actually running. So if you specify to send a message Sunday afternoon, but you shut down your computer for the weekend, the message will be delivered on Monday when Outlook launches.

In Outlook 2003

Just like in Outlook 2007, you want to go into the message options dialog to delay delivery. In Outlook 2003, you get there by clicking a toolbar button. Click the Options button as shown in the screenshot below.

The message options window looks exactly the same in Outlook 2003, so just set the time you want the message delivered in the dialog as shown above.  As in Outlook 2007, delivery will happen the first time Outlook is running after the date and time you specified.

And that’s it!

Combine Delayed Delivery with Boomerang, and you’ve taken full control of how you respond to messages when timing matters.

Also try: three.sentenc.es for responding to emails you’re agonizing over quickly, Unsearch for finding out what your coworkers have written about a topic, and Gist to make sure that you’re as up-to-date on your recipients as possible.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

-Peter Drucker.

Chris Sacca, a West Coast angel investor who I met at the Defrag conference, tweeted about a utility called RescueTime the other day.

RescueTime is a hybrid desktop application-web service that monitors how you spend your time on the computer and generates reports and analytics for you.  You install the tracker on your computer, where it monitors and tracks what application has focus – i.e. which of the 30 applications I’m running is the one I’m actually using.  It sends that information to a server, which turns the data into interesting reports. 

RescueTime has done a great job of classifying different applications (Total War: Rome shows up appropriately as a game, as does Tower Defense) and websites (espn.com, alabama live’s Alabama football section, and si.com all get grouped into a ‘sports’ category) into the right buckets.  I now know that I spend a staggering amount of time on sports websites, more time than I should gaming, and less time on Twitter/Facebook/RSS than I expected.

But even more valuable, RescueTime tells me how the productive time when I’m being “good” breaks down as well.  I know how much time I have spent on developing the CSS and HTML for Baydin.com’s new homepage redesign, how much time I spent QAing Boomerang, and how long it took me to record our shiny new demo video. I know exactly how long I spent in Visual Studio for each of the last three weeks, and how email grows to suck up however much time it possibly can (seriously, between Outlook and Gmail, the number is terrifying).

That’s not to say that I’m doing fantastic job of working harder since I installed it. I haven’t been especially more productive, but at least I know how I’m doing.  And I think I have a better handle on what kind of bang-for-the-buck I’m getting out of each activity.  I’m going to try very hard to spend more time coding and less time writing long emails that nobody’s going to read anyway.