Funny quick story to tell you about today. I launched my 16 Copybombs report on autopilot over the weekend… I actually put it together back in early June but my autoresponder was filled with blog posts and e-mails about Product University 2.0 at the time, so I had to schedule it.
Long story short, I messed up the download link and when I checked my e-mail today (Monday — I never check e-mail on weekends) to find literally over 100 e-mails from my buyers asking where the file was. Some of them e-mailed me 2 or 3 times about it.
Replying to 100 people, sounds like something that might take all day or even all week, right? Wrong… when you’re Robert Plank it takes 20 minutes.
Because I have a separate autoresponder list for each product, and I automatically capture my PayPal payments to those lists, I blasted the corrected link to that list… but I still needed to reply to those 100 messages to make sure everyone got the new link.
As you know I use Gmail and I use it PROPERLY. Get an e-mail, either respond to it or not, and then either Archive or Delete it. Delete means you’ll never need that message again. Archive means you can get back to it by clicking “All Mail” or searching for it, but it’s out of your Inbox now.
My second secret weapon is the “Send & Archive” button in Gmail. You can install this by going to Gmail Labs — there’s a green beaker icon in the top right corner where you can add experimental features to Gmail. Hit Ctrl+F to search the page and type “archive” and you’ll be brought right to it.
Enable the app and now when you reply to a message, you can hit “Send and Archive” which will send you response to that person and then archive the message. When that person replies to you, it’ll show their conversation in the thread, but for now, it’s out of your inbox.
That’s how I responded to 100 e-mails in under 20 minutes. First I checked the boxes for the e-mails I didn’t need to reply to, like notifications of payments and so on. Hint: You can tick one checkbox, hold down the Shift key, tick a checkbox 10 messages down, and all the checkboxes in between will be checked. Very powerful.
After clearing out the messages I didn’t need, I opened the first e-mail complaining about no download link. I typed a quick response, copied it to the clipboard, then did a Send and Archive. From that point on, it took me about 5 seconds to skim each e-mail and 5 seconds to paste and do a Send-Archive.
If you need to send a bunch of messages fast, that’s the way to do it:
- Clear out the messages you don’t need (Shift-click checkboxes then Delete)
- Copy and paste the message you need to repeat.
- Send-Archive each message.
I customized a couple of the responses which is why it took me a whole 20 minutes to reply to 100 people.
I have a whole section on e-mail productivity in my 100 Timesavers product if you’re interested. (I know you are.)
What’s your best e-mail productivity tip? Leave me a comment telling me below…
