As CEO of an email productivity company, the opportunity to flex my muscles and rip through a few hundred emails at a staggering pace feels sort of like a NASCAR driver getting ready for a race. It’s exhilarating to know that you’re going faster than almost anyone else on the planet! For most folks, though, it’s not quite that exciting. If the thought of clearing your Inbox on a Monday morning doesn’t make you leap out of bed already, these tips might change that.

As part of our ongoing efforts to help folks manage email better, we’ve compiled a list of the top 10 tips for managing a lot of email from our Revive Your Inbox 21-day email course. If you feel like your email could use a small shot in the arm, give these tips a read-through and start putting them to work! If you feel like your email could use a BIG shot in the arm, sign up for the 21-day course. Every day includes digestible, actionable information about how to make your email work better for you. Best of all, it’s completely free!

1. Use search to find specific emails. It takes less than 30% as long to find a message using search as with any other way. Modern email clients include very powerful search capabilities – spend 15 minutes learning to use them, and it will pay dividends for years.
2. Try turning off email notifications on your computer and your phone! Every time a notification comes up, it takes your brain over a minute to fully regain concentration.
3. Don’t bother with complicated folder systems – research shows it’s significantly faster to find messages by scrolling through a list of every message you’ve ever received than by looking through an “organized” set of folders.
4. Send messages at optimal times – usually just before work or during lunch, and rarely in the late afternoon. A message sent  +at 7am is almost 4 times as likely to be opened as one sent  +at 4pm.
5. Leave only messages that still need your prompt attention in your inbox. Move the rest to a single old mail folder, or Archive them in Gmail. That way, your old messages are still searchable, and it’s harder for emails that aren’t “finished” to fall through the cracks.
6. Try writing shorter emails. You’ll be surprised at how well people respond to brevity in email. A good guideline: try to keep most of your messages (though clearly not all!) under five sentences.
7. If your schedule allows, set up specific time blocks each day to handle your email. During those times, go through your emails in batches. If possible, try not to make one of these times first thing in the morning, so that you start your day with your most important work, rather than the seemingly most urgent.
8. Figure out a system for deferring messages to later. Research from CMU shows that over 1/3 of all email doesn’t need attention now, but needs it again later. Some options include an email reminder service like Boomerang for Gmail or Boomerang for Outlook that can bring messages back to your attention later (full disclosure: we make these!) or a system of folders like the one popularized by the Getting Things Done system. Both these methods work much better than leaving dozens of messages in your inbox.
9. If you’re sending an email where you ask for more than one thing, number your requests and put them near the top of the message. If the requests are numbered, it’s easy for the recipient to figure out what he/she needs to do!
10. Finally, try to make the first sentence of your emails descriptive. Most mail clients show a small snippet of the message in the inbox view. Which one of these is more likely to get your attention? “Important meeting next Friday. Please RSVP!” or “Hey Frank, I’m just writing to let you know”

——————-

I have an enormous amount of respect for what Jeff Bezos has accomplished at Amazon. One of his most insightful practices is to send a letter to all Amazon shareholders each year. In this letter, he articulates the vision of the company, a high-level overview of what Amazon accomplished and learned from the previous year, the trends that impact Amazon, and the medium-term plan to remain ahead of those trends.

Mr. Bezos writes these letters because they provide a unified message about the company to everyone involved. They also provide a vehicle to clarify his thoughts and reflect on the path of the company each year. I believe this kind of reflection will be a powerful tool for me and valuable for you.

This year marks the first of what I hope will be many years of writing this letter.

2011 Overview

Baydin achieved many milestones in 2011.

This time last year, Baydin was a three person startup, new to Silicon Valley. We had two products on the market, Boomerang and The Email Game, and we were splitting our time 65/35 between them. Boomerang had roughly 300,000 downloads, no payment system, and had just added response tracking to the list of features. We had brought on a fantastic team of investors, but were just learning how to unlock the value of the network you all provide.

Last year, we were tenacious and fortunate enough to see many of the events that significantly move the needle for an early stage startup:

• In July, we transitioned Boomerang to a freemium SaaS product. Our conversion from active-to-paid users is ~10%, which is an incredible rate, and far above the SaaS average.
• Baydin has the option to be a profitable company in 2012, including all salaries and expenses. We are likely to eschew this option in favor of faster growth, but it is amazing to have it on the table.
• Boomerang crossed the million-download mark, and between The Email Game and Boomerang, our systems handed over four million messages in 2011.
• We closed all of the committed funds from our seed round, ending up at a $400,000 raise in May.
• We explicitly chose to focus on Boomerang as our core product last year. Although focus remains a test of willpower for us, spending 95% of our time on Boomerang allowed us to establish a significant early lead in mindshare in the email enhancement space.
• Our interns made some significant enhancements to The Email Game. The Email Game is much further from achieving its potential than Boomerang, and largely received benign neglect from the Baydin team last year.

We are very pleased with the results of 2011, and we look forward to an even more successful 2012.

Trends from 2011

Last year was a significant year for the email development ecosystem. Several new trends emerged, and Boomerang was at the forefront of many of them.

• Baydin showed the world a path to making substantial, sustainable revenue in the horizontal consumer-facing email market. Venture capitalists have invested millions of dollars in email over past decades, with significant returns in infrastructure and marketing companies, and significant hemorrhaging in consumer-facing investments. Baydin has established that it is possible to build a SaaS business on top of a major email platform and achieve traction.
• Gmail is becoming a more significant development platform, and one that is easier to build on. In part due to requests from us, Gmail’s APIs now provide richer, easier to use functionality for integrating client and server interfaces. Adding interface elements to Gmail has gone from a difficult technical challenge to one that many developers can conquer, thanks to improving browser extension functionality. In short, the technical integration challenges that prevented anyone from building features like Boomerang’s for the last 18 months are disappearing. As a result, our technical barriers to entry will need to become broader and more universal, rather than platform-specific.
• The trends above mean that the copycat services will begin to arrive in 2012. One service recently launched as a clone of Boomerang’s send later feature, all the way down to the menu text. A company adding CRM to Gmail copied our Send Later interface as roughly half their service. Fortunately, the quality, user experience, and reliability of Boomerang dramatically outstrips both these services. Another email service, better funded and currently focused on salespeople, will launch a pro product in 2012. Their customer development survey indicates that it will be a ripoff of Boomerang from top to bottom, with the same feature set and at the same price point. None of these services have a high quality product or a significant user base yet, but the increased ease of development means that they likely will, before the end of this year. We will be aggressive about growing our market share while these companies’ products remain nascent.
• These trends also mean that in addition to outright copies, several companies are introducing email products that seek to achieve different goals. We will consider partnerships with some of these companies.
• The idea of email as a user interface started to emerge last year as well. Movable Ink announced raising a fortune to create email that will load images that can change based on the time it’s opened. Many tools in which reading and replying to an email replace a web interface were introduced.

Some trends we identified last year have continued or accelerated since

• Google Apps continues to cannibalize Exchange at roughly the same pace Exchange cannibalizes Lotus Notes. Google Apps is making inroads into large corporations, which means greater opportunities for Boomerang to sell to enterprises. To date, we are working on deals with two of Google Apps’s five largest customers that may or may not come through.
• Email as a whole is becoming an interesting development ecosystem. From services seeking to replace email (doomed projects, in my opinion) to the growth and proliferation of infrastructure services like SendGrid, Mailgun, and Context.io, to the burgeoning add-on space, things are getting crowded. This trend works to our advantage (more legitimacy, more general awareness of products like ours) and to our disadvantage (lots of companies fighting for low-differentiation market space)
• Naïve gamification is reaching the mainstream, but the leading edge is starting to look for something else as the effectiveness of points and badges proves fleeting.
• Social networks and text messages have begun to displace personal email, and will continue to do so, especially among students. There has been no similar shift for business email, since Facebook messages and text messages are not conducive to high-information-density communication.

Baydin will keep a close watch on these trends through 2012.

Baydin Mission

We are still much closer to the beginning of this journey than to the end. We are very happy that you have chosen to embark on it with us. In 2011, we were finally able to stop worrying about how we were going to pay rent and buy food each month, allowing us to clarify our thinking about the longer view of the company’s development.

Today, Baydin helps its customers focus on email that matters, when it matters. Our tools allow for reading and responding to messages faster and more decisively than before. These achievements mark only a small part of how we envision the company growing.

Our mission is to make productivity software that encourages people to be more productive. Some
of the beliefs that will guide us as we work toward this mission include:

• Context-aware. The next revolution in productivity software will come from software that analyzes the context of what we are working on and adds value on top of it. Leading the shift will require technical skills that few teams have. Fortunately, we have these skills, and cloning the functionality will remain difficult for years to come.
• Sensible defaults. Context-aware systems will not be perfect, and spending time trying to make them so is a task for academic researchers. Instead, the system needs to supply an easy way for users to change mistakes, without imposing too heavy a burden on them. Designing this interaction properly will be a major challenge, which our team is well suited to conquer.
• Persuasive Software. Research in practical psychology continues to uncover surprising truths about how our minds work. Our productivity software will incorporate the results of that research into broad, horizontal products. Designing these interactions will require significant skill and discretion, as we have learned from The Email Game.
• Communication first. Applying our core productivity themes to communication and collaboration software will result in the greatest impact. We will not make the mistake of trying to build a competitor to all of Microsoft Office in one fell swoop, and we will likely never make a spreadsheet.
• Data-Driven. We believe that data is the closest approximation to the truth. We will base our decisions, wherever possible, on the results of statistically-significant measured data.
• Respectful software. We will not make software that helps one party profit at the expense of another. There is a fundamental conflict in the email space. Some companies seek to profit by increasing the effectiveness and intrusiveness of gray email, to the detriment of our privacy and our ability to choose how we spend our attention. We seek to profit by increasing the effectiveness of everyone else.

2012 and Beyond

In 2010, we built Boomerang and achieved product/market fit with it. In 2011, we channeled Boomerang’s momentum into meaningful revenue. In 2012, we will focus on scaling the business and making it more robust against adverse events.

[Section on detailed 2012 plans removed. Sorry, competitors!]

The past two years have been a wonderful experience. It’s an incredible privilege to be able to work on these problems with such a great team. I’m grateful for the hard work that the team put in this year, for all our customers who have chosen us, and for all of your support over the last year. We look forward to accomplishing great things in 2012.

-Alex
March 2012

Vertical:

Horizontal:

(click on the photos for a full-screen versions)

With one of these, you’re guaranteed to make your Valentine feel special. Or, if you don’t already have a Valentine, giving a lucky lady or gent one of these will ensure that he or she will become your Valentine! Get the printable version here!

1. Just mark the check box of any message you would like to schedule for return,

2. Click the “Boomerang” button,

3. Select a time or enter a custom time and click “Confirm”.

It’s that easy! Note that you will need to be using Gmail’s new look to see the Bulk Boomerang options. You may also have to reload your Gmail page to ensure that you have the latest version of Boomerang installed.  If you want to reschedule any of the messages, just go to the “Manage scheduled messages” page from the Boomerang menu.

That’s cool, you say, but you can’t really see yourself using it? Below are a few examples of how we are using Bulk Boomerang, but we bet you can think of a few too…

• Avoid the morning rush. – Everyone who is anyone knows that the best time to send an email is between 7 and 10 am, so use Bulk Boomerang first thing when you arrive at the office to select all of the email you know can wait and have it Boomerang back sometime later in your day, when its convenient for you.
• Meeting prep 101. – Have an important meeting or project coming up and want to be sure and to be prepared? Select all of the relevant emails and have them return before the meeting in question. That way you can brush up on all the facts and wow your boss or potential client.
• Daily Deals. – I love reading these emails, but honestly, who has time during work? Select them all to return at once later in the day, say during your 3pm coffee break or just before happy hour, then shop and save to your heart’s content without losing precious work hours running up your credit card bills.

We hope you love Bulk Boomerang as much as we do and remember; Life’s a mess, your email shouldn’t be!

Check out these screen shots of Bulk Boomerang in action:

After spending the first 20 some odd years in Kansas, I decided to move to the East Coast, where I live in Washington, DC for over 8 years. In DC, I attended the Catholic University of America and studied philosophy. While I was in school, I also worked a variety of restaurants in the city. Serving, tending bar, and managing (at one restaurant, I did all three); I did just about everything! I fell in love with the city, culture, food, and wine. So, what brings me out West you ask? Well, back in 2008 with the raucous Presidential Election going on, there was this new start up called AirBedandBreakfast.com making splashes in the Tech World. I became an early adopter of the service and eventually an remote employee, which led to multiple trips to the Bay Area and the dream of one day moving to SF.

This past summer that dream came true. After leaving DC and bouncing around North and South America for a few months with just a backpack full of clothes, I made the move to San Francisco permanent. At Airbnb, I found a new career in the tech space.Even though I still love the restaurant biz (hopefully, opening my own someday), I knew this is what I wanted to do. To build on my previous experience I’m taking a couple of programming classes, as well as the online course at CodeAcademy.com. So, far I’m really enjoying to program.

So, what about Baydin, you ask? Well, a few months ago a friend told me about the thing called Boomerang for Gmail, I was intrigued and decided to check it out. Then earlier this month, Baydin posted an ad out for a Customer Service Rep, which I jumped at. I applied and here I am! All of my jobs, whether running a concession stand, working as a store clerk, waiting tables, or working for a startup, have been customer focused. And here at Baydin, user support is my number one priority. I’m here to help make your lives easier. So, no matter the question, large or small, send it my way and I’ll be happy to help. After all, you have a life to get back to and you shouldn’t need to stay buried under that pile of email!

Today, we’d like to officially welcome Safari to the Boomerang family!

If you have been holding out on installing Boomerang because you can’t give up Safari, wait no longer! Here are installation instructions for Safari-goers.

1. Click this red button to download the extension on Safari.

2.Open the downloaded extension file B4G_Safari.safariextz (it should be in your downloads folder), and dobule-click it to install.

3. Click “Install” when Safari asks for confirmation. The confirmation pop up looks like this.

4. Open Gmail in a new tab or refresh the current Gmail tab if you already have it open.

5. Ta-da! You should have Boomerang installed inside Gmail. To confirm you have installed it perfectly, look to the top right of Gmail and to the left of your email address, you should see a Boomerang menu. And if you want to learn how to use all the advanced Boomerang features, check out our demo video.

Let us know if you have any trouble installing this by sending an email to support at baydin dot com. Welcome to the party, Safari!

Alex with Gingerbread Christmas Tree Cookie

If you kept a close eye on our Twitter accounts during the holidays, you may have wondered how we were managing to respond to customer emails while we should have been opening presents. Of course, we were using Boomerang to write the messages before, but have them go out later.

Since we know our users are a creative bunch, we wanted to know how they used Boomerang during the holidays to make their hectic lives easier. So we held a contest to give away some gorgeous Boomerang T-shirts.  We got many tweets with varying degrees of cleverness, usefulness and hilarity. Thank you to everyone who tweeted a suggestion, and here are the 5 winners, picked by our team.

Winners of The Boomerang for Holidays T-shirt Contest

@baydin I am setting reminders for next year’s holidays based on this year’s lessons! #boomerang4holidays

— mblogler (@mblogler) December 23, 2011

Boomerang helped me this holiday season by automagically emailing invoices while i was on vacation #boomerang4holidays boomeranggmail.com
— Brian Lyman (@valestudios) January 5, 2012

Watched all my important emails from the holidays greet me throughout first day at work #boomerang4holiday
— Raoul N. (@rananava) January 5, 2012

Wanna know how productive my holidays were? Sent emails early morning w/o waking up before noon! boomeranggmail.com #boomerang4holidays
— Arturo Cárdenas (@arturocm) January 5, 2012

I used Boomerang to email Santa @ midnight Xmas eve, telling him coordinates to my chimney w/ brownies waiting on roof! #boomerang4holiday
— HERBIVORE PUBLICITY (@Herbivorepr) January 5, 2012

Congratulations, winners! Please email us at boomerang+tshirt at baydin.com with your choice of T-shirt size and color, along with a mailing address. For colors, we have bright blue and dark grey. Sizes range from XS to XL (for size reference, these are American Apparel t-shirts).

Since there are more than 5 that we really liked, we decided to award 3 extra runner-up prizes as well. Each of them will be getting a spin of our Wheel o’ Prizes.

Boomerang for Holidays Runner-up prize winners

Boomerang sent my pre-written email to remind Santa about my Christmas presents at 3am on 25th! #boomerang4holidays boomeranggmail.com

— lcdvirgo (@lcdvirgo) January 5, 2012

Boomerang helped me really enjoy my vacay because I knew EXACTLY who I needed to contact once I was back at the office! #boomerang4holidays

— Stephania Andrade (@OstephaniaO) January 5, 2012

Hey @baydin check out my post about boomerang for SEO’s bit.ly/w8daX5 Please give me a t-shirt IM COLD! #boomerang4holidays

— Nico Miceli (@NicoMiceli) January 5, 2012

If you are a runner-up prize winner, please email us at boomerang at baydin.com  to claim your link to spin the Wheel o’ Prizes.

This was a lot of fun and we really appreciate everyone who participated!

Sometimes finding an email you need is like finding the matches. You see that box of matches all the time around the house when you don’t need it, but when the electricity goes out, it’s nowhere to be found. Emails have a way of doing the same. When you don’t need a message, you can’t avoid seeing it in your inbox. But it will magically hide from you when you go looking for it.

Everyone has his own personal technique to find messages that he’s looking for. Some start with folders and labels. Some go straight to sorting messages and scanning individual folders and messages. Some use the search box first but fall back to sorting and scanning when the search doesn’t turn up what they’re looking for. All these individual techniques have been ingrained because people can’t trust that the email client’s search functionality will locate the messages they need.  Worry no more – we have some good news for you.

Email clients have gotten a lot smarter over the last 10 years, especially their search features. Thanks to the power of search, locating emails is easier than ever. With the right search terms, you should be able to find the specific email that you’re looking for in 5 seconds or less. Today, we’ll show you how to search effectively, and we hope that over time, you will start to trust the search functionality completely.

Here are some of the more useful basic search keywords:

• from: - Search messages from a specific sender name or email address.
• has:attachment - Search for messages that have files attached to them
• label: - Search for messages within a certain label, using hyphens between words for multi-word labels (Gmail only)
• before: - Search for messages sent before a date
• filename: - Search for file names of attachments or file name extensions (i.e. jpg or doc)

Since the exact commands differ from client to client, we made a couple of handy cheat sheets for Gmail and Outlook.  Go ahead and download the cheat sheet for your email client, print it out, and keep it on your desk for the next week.

All printed? Great – practice searching the following :

• Find a message that your coworker sent last week with an important attachment.  “from:joe has:attachment”.
• Find all messages that arrived before 2010.  “beforedate:2010″. .
• Find all messages from your boss, or your mom.  Try “from:boss OR from:mom”

Need even more power? You can easily try more advanced searches (and find other search parameters) by using your client’s query builder. In Gmail (new look), click the downward arrow next to the search button.

A similar advanced search feature exists in Outlook. The exact location differs depending on which version of Outlook you are using, but you should see it either as a dropdown or a tab while typing into the search box, as shown below.

I searched, but it’s still not there!

The default search in email clients often ignore messages in the Trash and Spam folders. In Gmail, remember to use the command “in:anywhere” to include Trash and Spam. In Outlook, access Search Options and check the setting that says “include messages from the Deleted Items folder”.

Introducing Revive Your Inbox

Did you find this post helpful? This is the content from Day 3 of our new 21-day Revive Your Inbox program.  The program provides step-by-step instructions and tips to make conquering email overload easy. You can join the program (it’s completely free) at http://reviveyourinbox.com and start the new year with a shiny inbox.

Even if you’re feeling great about your email, you almost certainly know someone who isn’t. Help them keep their new year’s resolution to conquer email overload by sharing this post here: Tweet

Starting immediately, when you refer a friend to Boomerang and they use the product for the first time, you and your friend both earn a spin of the Wheel o’ Prizes. So every time you recruit a new friend using your referral link, both of you benefit instantly.

When you refer friends to Boomerang, you can help them make email infinitely more satisfying. Now, you’ll also give them a chance to win a Kindle Fire, a stylish T-Boomerang shirt, or any of the other amazing prizes on the wheel:

We hope you (and your friends) enjoy the change. Happy spinning!