This past weekend Raymond Tomlinson, the man who invented the e-mail, died at the age of 74. While many of us often loathe what has become the most ubiquitous form of personal communication, Tomlinson’s invention shows no signs of diminishing any time soon, regardless of the increasing use of social media and other business communication platforms such as Slack and Asana. In this spirit, I thought I would share two services that have seriously helped me manage my inbox: Unroll.me and Followupthen.com.
Unroll.me
Unroll.me tackles one of the biggest contributors to email bloat: subscriptions. Often these subscription-based emails are generated for a good reason – in order to sign up for a service you consciously and voluntarily submit your email address. Once you make that fateful decision, however, the emails never stop coming, and the cumulative effect of these subscriptions can be overwhelming. Enter Unroll.me. This free service streamlines the process of unsubscribing to the email you no longer want receive and combining all the subscription email you do want to receive into a single daily digest. I’ve been using Unroll.me for about a year now and I can attest to its ability to effectively sort my email and drastically reduce the time I spend there.
Followupthen.com
One of the greatest inventions in the history of technology was the snooze button, greater, perhaps, than the alarm clock itself. What if email had a snooze button? What if all those “to do list” emails hanging out in your inbox would magically re-appear when you could actually act on them? Thank you, Followupthen.com, for giving us a free, easy way to snooze our email. The great thing about Followupthen.com is that you don’t have to go outside your email app to use it. As long as you know how to forward an email, you can use this service. And just like Unroll.me, Followupthen.com has the power to radically reduce the size of your inbox. I’ve found that it helps me stay on top of things so that I can focus on the emails that matter, like those from my students.
So give these two services a try and let us know what you think. Or, if you have any other email add-ons you love, leave a note in the comments below.
