By Derek Neighbors, Published on November 24, 2012
Sometimes when Getting Things Done, you need a little more power in your inbox than the default. Boomerang for GMail is the extra horsepower you need. A few things that Boomerang provides.
Send Mail Later
Sometimes you want to send e-mail in the future, but you are authoring them in the right now. Instead of creating drafts and having to set reminders to come back and send them. You can just schedule your emails as you compose them.
You may ask “Why schedule email instead of just sending it? It’s ansynchronous so it shouldn’t matter to the receiver.”
- Time of day can significantly affect the open/response rate. Timing some emails to optimize for that can be an advantage.
- You may want to say something that is special at specific time. It may be my colleagues birthday in 3 days, I am thinking about it right now, but I want the birthday wish to show up on their birthday.
- Sending reminders. You may want to remind a group of people about something in 2 weeks. If you send it now they will forget, if you wait until the day you want it, you may forget.
Remind Me to Followup
It is common that I will respond to someone via email and hope that they respond back. I have gotten pretty good in Things for handling this, but for many this is still a problem. Boomerang let’s you set an email to come back in your email box based on several conditions. For example, if by a certain day the recipient doesn’t reply.
Recurring Email
If you have a recurring email you want sent Boomerang can handle that too. I never use this feature but it is available if you have the need to send recurring emails.
You can install the GMail plugin or if you are using Mailplane it only takes a second. Give it a try and add some horse power to your GTD arsenal today.