I’m not usually a productivity tool user, but Superhuman, Cron and Bring! have changed my life. Oh, and get your phone out of the bedroom!
- Charging my phone outside of the bedroom
This advice is not new, but I ignored it for years because I thought “my phone is on silent, it won’t bother me at night”.
I don’t really scroll that much at night before bed, I just put the phone on the charger and leave it alone. The biggest thing that stopped me from charging in the other room is my alarm to wake up.
However, in the morning when I switched off the alarm, I saw all of the messages I received overnight. I would immediately read them, reply, and start working while still laying in bed.
I’ve been wearing a FitBit Luxe for 6 months now and I only just discovered it has an alarm functionality. I switched to this to wake me up and was able to charge my phone in the other room.
Something I will try in the coming month is to use Do Not Disturb. I’m a runner, and I use my phone to track my runs and when I pick up my phone to find my playlist and turn on Strava, I get pulled into the messages. I’m going to set an automatic DND to run through the night and up until the start of my working hours. That way I can see the flood of messages when I am really ready to see them.
- Inbox Zero
Wow! I am late to this trend. I first heard the term, Inbox Zero, in 2018 from a founder friend. I thought “ok, you cleared your inbox..so what.” I didn’t realize how bad my email habits were until I did an on-boarding with the e-mail client, Superhuman.
I thought the people with the worst email habits are the ones that leave everything unread. You know the people with a notification bubble with 30,560 unread emails. That sends me into a panic. I’m the type of person who needs to clear all the notification bubbles. So my strategy is to open every email and delete some irrelevant emails. Basically this meant that my inbox had 30,560 read emails in it. Everything that was important, I kept in the inbox. If I needed to reply to someone, I would keep it there. If it was really important, I flag it. Anything that still needed my attention, I kept mostly in my head. Or maybe I would write on a to-do list to take care of it later.
Superhuman taught me amazing email habits.
- How to clear your inbox
- How to set reminders (Remind Me)
- How to creating templates for commonly used emails (Snippets)
Clear your inbox
To get started, the on-boarding specialist asked, “When you scroll to look for something, how many days back do you scroll before you search?”
- I said 1-2 days, more than that and it’s chaos.
- This is how we found out that from my inbox with 30,560 e-mails we could send anything older than 2 days to the Archive.
This one step massively cleared my inbox. Now I had about 100 e-mails to deal with. From that the on-boarding specialist walked through the first 10 emails one by one so that I could also get a hand on their keyboard shortcuts. Superhuman aims to be the fastest email experience, and they’ve created many keyboard shortcuts so that you don’t have to waste time using the mouse to navigate around your email. This took a little getting used to and I’m still learning, but I see the advantages and am almost frustrated with myself when I grab for the mouse.
Remind Me
He asked me, does this need your attention today?
Yes – it stays in the inbox
No – either mark it as done and send it to the archive, or set a reminder. I can mark the email to remind me tomorrow morning, or in a week, then the e-mail leaves the inbox.
The Remind Me function has been the best help to me. All of those emails I was keeping in my head and on my to-do list suddenly left. I completely forget about them until they pop back in my inbox and remind me.
Snippets
I send a lot of the same emails. Often I have to reply to an introduction email, or send a short blurb introducing my company to someone. I have templates for these emails in Notion and every time I need them, I have to go get them from Notion to paste into an email. Superhuman solves this problem with Snippets. I can draft the text and save it within Snippets in Superhuman. When I want to use it, I can call the Snippet and insert it directly into the e-mail. Life changing!
I’m a fan, the only thing I’m not a fan of is the price. It’s $30/mo which is steep for a subscription. But it is something I use everyday and I did not realize how much of my memory I was using just to remember the emails I had to take care of.
Want to be referred? We both get a free month. Message me with your email address!
3. Cron – Calendar App
I’m a Google Calendar loyalist, until a friend sent me Cron.
Cron has a scheduling snippet, where you can highlight the times you are available and Cron automatically generates a snippet that you can copy into your email. Such as:
Would 30 mins during any of these times (all in GMT+1) work for you?
- Tomorrow Wed May 25, 3-3:30 PM
- Thu May 26, 12:15-2 PM
- Fri May 27, 3-5 PM
You can also list multiple time zones on your calendar so you can quickly see what time it is for your colleagues.
And if you keep your notifications on, right before a virtual meeting is about to start, Cron will push a notification with the meeting link.
4. Bring! Shopping List App
I used the Notes app on the iPhone for my shopping list. The Notes app has many flaws, and my top annoyances are:
- It’s so difficult to add a collaborator to the list. This also happens for shared photo albums. What’s going on Apple! This is so painful.
- When making a checklist you cannot sort the items
- If you do not have good reception, the list does not update.
In a moment of frustration with the Notes app when I realized my grocery list had Hummus listed 3 times, I decided to search for a dedicated shopping list app and I found Bring! It was very easy to sign up and invite people to join my list.
Bring! has most grocery items already created, so you can easily add them to your list and specify the quantity or size you need. Like-items automatically sort themselves together, however you can customize your sorting. There is even a messaging feature where you can announce that you’re going shopping soon and to add last minute items, and also announce an urgent message “Please get [item]!”
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