Have you become a slave to email and feel overwhelmed by the numbers which come into your inbox every day? What is urgent, what can wait and what can be deleted? There are many ways to handle these but in this new age of technology why not use something that can do it for you – welcome to FollowUpThen.
The concept of time management has been around for decades and how well we manage our time both in our work and personal lives often determines our success and our levels of stress. Technology should give us more control of our time but in some instances we have become slaves to new expectations of deadlines, daily tasks and information management.
In your working life how do you manage incoming tasks? You essentially have five choices:
1. Act – do something about it now
2. Delegate – give it to someone else to action it
3. Defer – put it off to a later date
4. File – put it in a reference folder so you can access it at any time when needed
5. Delete – just push that ‘delete’ button and it is gone
FollowUpThen manages the ‘defer’ process for you so you don’t miss the deadline knowing you will be reminded later when it is actually due or important to you. The concept is very simple allowing you to ‘defer’ an email to some specified date, time or period in the future and have it come right back like an email boomerang when you want to deal with it.
Here is an example how this could work for you:
You are out for lunch when you receive an email on your phone about an upcoming SCA event that you have registered for. It contains a full agenda, notes about attire for the various social events as well as other helpful notes about finding the venue. This is all great info, except that there is little chance you will remember it in four weeks when the event is actually due, so where do you file it? At this point you hit the forward button and send the email to [email protected]. You then mark the email as read and clear your mind knowing the information will be available when you need it. Fast forward three weeks and five days and you receive the exact same email forwarded to you from FollowUpThen on Saturday afternoon while you are preparing to pack for the event. You now have all the information at your fingertips at the time when it is important to you.
They key benefits of the service in this example are that you manage the email right there and then (no re-reading when you got back to the office) and most importantly that the email is out of your head and your sight - leaving you to focus on other things.
The free service gives you access to most of the features with the paid version ($4.99 per month) allowing you to recover attachments, SMS reminders, calendars and more. Check out www.followupthen.com for more info.
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