How I Defer Email with SaneBox – Sponsor

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email management service I’ve now used for years. For this post, I’d like to focus on one SaneBox feature, deferring email.

Deferring email is the process of taking something in your inbox and snoozing it for a set period of time. This gets the email out of your life and lets you focus on other things until some time in the future when you’re in a better place to process that mail.

When I first heard of the idea of deferring email, I mocked it. It seemed like a waste of time. However, I was wrong. I’ve now been postponing email for several years and find it useful. I get a lot of email that doesn’t merit getting sorted into my task system but also isn’t appropriate for right now. Deferring that email just takes a second and there is something to be said for getting that mail out of the way while you continue doing the hard work.

With SaneBox, you have nearly unlimited options for deferring email. You can defer it to tomorrow, or next week, or Saturday morning, or a specific time. For today, I thought it’d be fun to share my deferred email boxes on my MacSparky email account.

Afternoon

This is the nutty one that will make a lot of people angry. I do a thorough sweep through my MacSparky account every morning and afternoon. I try to stay out of that email account in between but inevitably find myself in there for one reason or another. Pushing email away until the afternoon review by deferring it is a great way to keep myself from getting sidetracked by non-critical email.

Tomorrow, 2 Days, 5 Days

I only give a certain amount of time to email every day, primarily in the morning. I always deal with the most critical email first either answering it directly or turning its response into an OmniFocus project. If there is still email left and time’s up, I defer the email out into the future.

Deferring non-critical email is a great solution, and it’s just one of the many features available to you with a SaneBox subscription. Best of all, use the links in this post to get a discount.

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OmniGraffle, Graphics Software for Mortals – Sponsor

This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniGraffle, by the Omni Group. OmniGraffle is the diagramming and graphics tool made for people that don’t have the time to get a degree in diagramming and graphics. It’s a powerful application that is also easy to use. In other words, it’s an application made by the Omni Group.

I initially bought OmniGraffle to make simple diagram-style graphics for use in presentations during trials, but once I realized how easy the application is to use, I found all sorts of uses for it. I often use the iPad version to diagram relationships as clients describe them to me during meetings. I’m a visual thinker so seeing things in diagram form help me understand better (and clients are always impressed).

I use OmniGraffle to make our family holiday card. I use Omni Graffle to design stickers for the rubber storage bins we put in the attic. I’m getting a new office later this year, and I’m currently designing that in OmniGraffle. I even use OmniGraffle to design the covers of my books. The iPhone Field Guide cover was made in OmniGraffle.

If you believe you don’t have a single graphic artist bone in your body, you should download the OmniGraffle free trial and check it out for yourself. What you’ll find is that the application does most of the hard work for you. They even have extensive online-based stencil libraries, making many projects as easy as drag and drop. They’ve got versions for Mac, iPad, and iPhone so no matter which Apple platform you prefer, you can make beautiful diagrams and graphics with OmniGraffle.

My latest OmniGraffle project. Click to enlarge.

Tame Your Email with SaneBox – Sponsor

This week’s sponsor, SaneBox is the solution to so many of my email problems. SaneBox is the email service that adds a pile of productivity features to your email, regardless of what email client you use. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain point, and it doesn’t need to be. With SaneBox at your back, you can:

Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant.
Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They’ve even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I’m underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.”
Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

The list goes on, and MacSparky readers love this service.

The SaneBox team has been hard at work lately improving the SaneBox interface and releasing even more new tools. For instance, now you can have SaneBox send an auto-reply when you defer an email. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account today. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.

Power Up with TextExpander – Sponsor

This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by TextExpander, the easiest way to start automating your work on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. TextExpander is a text replacement tool. With it, you can type a phrase like “ccell” and it will automatically fill in your cell phone number. But TextExpander is so much more than that.

Using TextExpander, you can have it automatically create the date and time. For example, when I talk with someone on the phone related to the day job and want to keep notes about the conversation, I just type “xdts” which, in my head, means date and time string. Then TextExpander automatically creates something like this, “2018-03-28 06:42”. If I need to put the full date in a letter, I just type “fdate” and TextExpander puts in the current date, like this, “March 28, 2018”.

But TextExpander can still go deeper. It can use the contents of your clipboard to auto-fill in snippets. It can press keyboard keys, like the tab key, to automate filling in forms on the web or creating an email. You can get it for yourself and your team members so you can share snippets with your team members.

I’ve done so much with TextExpander over the years that I even have a page of snippets I’ve created that you can download ranging from movie to reviews to conference calls. One of my personal favorite groups is foreign thanks where you can say thank you to people in most language. Sending an email to a French friend, just type “french thanks” and TextExpander gives you “Merci”. It’s like your own, personal translator.

To learn more, head over to TextExpander.com and let them know you heard about it at MacSparky in the “Where did you hear about us” field.