How to use email productively - #NoOffice - productivity podcast by Nozbe

See how to organize your inbox and email communication and how to deal with incoming messages to be more effective, productive and safe

⭐️ Key things you will learn from this episode:

In this episode of the podcast you will learn a few non-obvious things about emails, including:

  • why using email in a team is not productive,
  • how to automatically send emails to Nozbe,
  • which emails to send to Nozbe and which to reply to… and which to ignore
  • can Nozbe replace email in a team

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Read this episode’s transcript if you prefer

We’re back. And we’re back with a new episode for you. And now the idea will be that at 10 a .m. New York time, Easter time, every other Wednesday, and there will be a meeting with me online. So this one, we haven’t promoted much, so maybe not so many people will come, but every other Wednesday will try to promote it and then for other people to show up. But anyway, the idea is that we will be recording podcast, an audio and video podcast, which will later be published as #NoOffice Podcast. This is the new season, the new beginnings of #NoOffice Podcast. I have recorded a previous show about messages in Nozbe and it was watched and viewed by many people and I think the excitement about having in Nozbe messages was great. So now it’s time for the new show for the new podcast, starting from September now every other week. So every other Wednesday, I’ll be recording here from my Nozbe HQ, from my home office, no office. And we’ll talk about many aspects, how to manage company, how to manage a team, how to do it effectively, productively, but how to also deal with stuff in a productive way. My name is Michael Sliwinski. I’m the founder and CEO of Nozbe, and I’ve been helping smart, small business owners get their teams and their private and business life organized in one simple app for the last 17 years and I love it. I love having thousands of customers, having thousands of teams and people from all over the world being there and, using Nozbe and just being around. So let’s start with today’s topic.

Today’s topic is going to be email because I assume that now people are back from their holidays, are back from vacations. Many have taken like two weeks vacations. And I hope you were not checking your email while on vacation. And if you were, you were cheating. But anyway, the idea is that very often after we come back from holidays, there are many things that we have to deal with, and especially we have to deal with email. Today, I’m going to share with you some tips, how to deal with email, how to do it productively. So let’s get into it. I’m going to add a presentation here. Let’s see if I can move it around. Okay, maybe. Let’s do it like this. All right. So, email versus Nozbe is the presentation, is the idea.

And let’s dive into it. So many concepts that I’m going to share are, I mean, Nozbe was originally inspired by Getting Things Done® book by David Allen. Here’s me with David Allen when I met him for the first time, one year after I launched Nozbe. And now Nozbe is much more, robust than just, David Allen’s Getting things done® implementation, but there are things that are still inspired by him. And one of the things will be the two-minute rule, which I’ll be talking about very soon. And I’ve also, speaking of books, I’ve also written my book, 10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity. And this book will be available for you as a free e -book. OK. so if you can do something in less than two minutes, don’t write it down. Just do it. So, two minutes, less than two minutes. And this should be your guiding tool when you are processing email after vacations, after holidays, after summer holidays. Because when you’re back and there’s an email andthe answer to this email, just write it right there. And less than two minutes, do it now, answer in two minutes, and just go. If you cannot, then you should add it to your task and project management application like Nozbe.

And you can do it in many ways, and we’ll talk about these today. You can either just, go to Nozbe, create a task, and copy the, put the task name and maybe copy the email as a comment to the task, or you can forward this to Nozbe, which we’ll talk about a little bit later today. So, two minutes rule, two minutes. Give yourself two minutes to react in this way. in half an hour, you will have replied to 15 emails at least, and maybe more. Just remember, ifthe answer to the email, reply to the email, and that’s it.

Okay, so the second thing I wanted to share here is the power of small wins. So do something small and see how the project moves forward. This is what I said in my webinar about 10 steps to automate productivity, is that when you move a project, a task, when you complete a task in a project, you move the project forward. You feel like the project is gaining momentum. And this is the same thing. The moment you start processing emails like a champ using two-minute rule, and then you’re moving forward and you’re unpiling yourself from all these emails after summer holidays so small winsa quick reply is a nice small win but it works!

And now let’s get to the gist of this of this podcast episode is that you actually should avoid email in many circumstances especially if you’re working with a team, you should avoid emailing each other internally. So basically, in a team, no more email. This way, when you come back from holidays, there’s no more email to process from your teammates. But everything should be in your projects, tasks, and comments in your productivity system like Nozbe. So why we believe that no email internally is the way? So why is email bad? great, but this way, all these bosses will receive these CCs, BCC’s emails. They will not know if they are actually supposed to do anything. They will be overworked by processing your email, and it will be just too much noise, and they will not react to it. So this is wrong. This is wrong. And when you have a task and project in Nozbe, you can just mention the person who is supposed to be mentioned, but you are confident that other people have access to this project and this task. So if they choose to, they can go there and see it. In the moment you use email and CC, very often people have rules like everything I am CC it. I just go to a different folder. I will never look at it again. So second thing, very often we try to be very productive when we’re processing email. and we are processing, we’re going through numerous tasks, numerous topics in one email message. So, oh, Michael, I would like to talk to you about this and about that and about this private thing, like everything in one email. It seems productive and good, everything in one email. But then if the person knows the reply to the first question but doesn’t know the second, then the whole email gets delayed. It doesn’t make any sense. So it’s just, it’s just not good. It delays the answer, and maybe some people will just not reply to one of the points, so you will have to repeat it, it will not be productive. While if you use a system like NOSPI, then the thing is that you have projects, tasks, and comments. So each comment is relevant to just one task, to just one project. This way, if you’re commenting, you’re commenting about one thing. Well, it’s not. If it’s sent by email, it’s decrypted. So basically everybody can intercept this email and, see the contents of the email, which is not good. The whole connection to Nozbe, for example, to a system like Nozbe is completely encrypted. And on top of it, the files that we are storing on Nozbe servers are encrypted as such. So even If I have access to my servers and I see the file, the file is gibberish to me because it’s encrypted. That’s why many lawyers are using NOSPI as their way to manage important documents and important contracts because they know that they are confident that it’s encrypted and that nobody can see it apart from them and their customers and their clients. And And the last part is the spam problem that, right now, we have artificial intelligence in theory. We have AI. But somehow messages, important messages go to spam. why? I’ve been, I’ve been, of course, I mean, exchanging emails with this guy and now suddenly his emails or her emails are going to spam. Or they’re not delivered. I’m replying to somebody and I get them, a message, oh, I’m sorry, but your server is not allowed. You cannot, send a message. So it’s really bad for collaboration if you cannot get your message through. That’s why, if you’re working with people, you have them, in the project, in the task, in the comment, so you can just freely talk to them and comment on stuff. So these are the problems. Why email is bad for collaboration. And of course, I didn’t mention here, just the fact that, email, important email gets mixed with the not important email. So you’re in theory processing email, but then you’re reading the newsletters, then you’re seeing some status updates. I mean, everything gets mixed, and it’s not good. It’s not proactive. All right. In my team, we have this phrase that we use, task me. So send me a task. If it’s not in a task, it doesn’t exist. So whenever somebody wants something from me, they can task me. They can send me a task. And some of our customers who’ve been introducing Nozbe in their teams have reported that this creates a small issue with their bosses that suddenly, people who are below them are tasking the bosses that are tasking their managers. But in the end, They eased up to it. They realized it was a good idea. And the culture of the company changes, because suddenly it’s more like we are more like colleagues. In German language, the default way to call an employee is not used the word, I mean, it’s used the word mitarbaiter. On mitarbaiter is employee, but it also means co -worker. So we treat treat each other as coworkers, not as, you work for me, I work for you. So it’s really, really good. And I think this kind of attitude is the best. And I have, after 17 years of running Nozbe, I’ve come to terms that Nozbe is a habit -changing application, when it’s introduced either to, one person or two -person’s team, or it’s a bigger team. The whole team or the person who’s using Nozbe changes their habits because suddenly they’re putting stuff in the tasks, in the projects, in the comments, and suddenly they are talking to each other at the comments. They are exchanging ideas in the comments, and they are asking each other. They’re doing something completely different. And it’s great. I think it’s really good, and I think it’s really productive. This is the way to go, And this creates this equilibrium, this transparency and partnership, sense of partnership. And I think it’s great. So to summarize, why no email, why you should avoid emails? So why try to reduce the number of emails before you start processing them? So first, and then how to do it. So first, Ditch email in a team. So in a team, use a dedicated app like Nozbe. Projects, tasks, and comments. That’s it. Assign each other tasks. That’s why I said. Task me. Write thoughtful feedback in the comments. And then move away from even, contacting clients. So the level master of using Nozbe is that you can share projects with external, with your customers, with your clients. You can just invite them to Nozbe. They can have a free account, and they can share a project with you. So when you’re on Nozbe Premium, you’re using Nozbe, and you can create a joint project, project with another team, and work with them like this. This is, for example, how we work with our accounting firm. Our accounting firm normally works with clients using email, But we said, no, no, no, not with us. With us, we work in a project. And we have two or three projects with them that we share with them. And then in these projects, we exchange tasks, we exchange comments. And for example, all the invoices go to these projects, and then they can process the invoices and, take care of our accounting.

We don’t have to do this like what many people are doing. When they get invoices, they first collect them, they download them, they zip them, and then they send them to the accountant. No, no, we automatically get these inside our projects, and then the accountants are dealing with this. So it’s really, really productive. It’s really really useful. So this is how you do email productively, and this is how you get fewer emails, so that next time you’re on holidays and you’re getting back from holidays, you’ll have to process so many emails. So, as I mentioned, this is the next step that not only you communicate within your team without email, then with others as well. Because what I believe and what we believe and what many of our customers already believe, that emails are very good for handshakes, but then the work continues in Nozbe. So you can share, as I mentioned, you can share projects within your organization with the team, and also you have joint projects with external companies, external teams, or freelancers. And then you can even email a task. So in Nozbe, in the new Nozbe, you can now also email a task directly to somebody with an email address. They get an email saying, hey, there’s a task, click on the task. When they click on the task, they can write a comment right away to this task. They don’t even have to have a Nozbe account. is the simple way, is the way to organize your private and business life in one app. And mostly it’s your way not to have that much email, not to deal with this email. So Nozbe is free for up to three active projects and three people in the team. So there is no excuse, even if you have a big company, to try with your, direct reports, with just, your assistant, maybe another partner and try Nozbe for yourself for free and then upgrades to premium or business plan. And Nozbe, unlike our competition, is really easy to use. And we have this clear structure of projects, tasks, and comments, which is really easy for people to jump in. This is what our customers have been praising us for. I mean, they’ve tried the whole competition, Asanas, Mondays and other trellos of the world. They prefer Nozbe because it’s simpler to use. It is powerful, but for their team members, it’s really easy to use. And what’s most important is that, it works as good on a mobile phone as it does on the desktop. Of course, on the desktop you have more screen estate, but on a mobile phone, you have the same amount of power. So it’s like you can do still the same things. You can create new projects. You can set up projects from templates. You can delegate tasks. You can answer comments. Everything can be done with the smartphone. And we have cases of CEOs of companies using Nozbe and never logging in on the desktop. They just use, they manage the whole company from their iPhone. Thanks to Nozbe. So I encourage you to check it out at Nozbe .com. Let’s continue our journey with email. Now, with practical tips and tricks. I am the practical guy. I like practical tips and tricks. So let’s get into it. In Nozbe, every Nozbe account gets an email address automatically. So like an automatic email address. So this way, if you forward an email to Nozbe, to this email address, to this unique email address, what happens is that the name of the task is the subject of the email, and the contents of the email are in the comment. And I’ll show you how it’s done right now. So this is the presentation, and let’s go directly to the interesting slides. So there we go. So as you can see in the settings, you can just go to Add Tasks via email and just copy your email address. section in a project can have a unique email address. And I’ll get back to that in just a second, which is really, really powerful. So this way you can add several contacts, several Nozbe contacts, to your email client. Let’s say, forward this to this contact, which means to this project in Nozbe. Or forward this just to Nozbe and then later I’ll process it because it goes into your single tasks to be processed later. And this is really cool. But again, going back to our two -minute rule, if you see that this email requires your attention and requires a longer response, so what you do is you reply quickly to this person saying, hey, I’m on it. I’ll letin a few days. And then you forward this email to Nozbe so that you have a task, and you can remember about this task, and you can schedule it, is really powerful from the manual standpoint. So when you’re processing, using two -minute rule, you are replying quickly, but then if an email requires a longer response, you just tell them, hey, I’ll get back to you later, and then you forward this to your task manager. This way you can manage when you get to deal with this. But this is just the beginning.

The best part is how you can actually automate it. So, here’s our integration with Calendly. So Calendly is this app where you can schedule your meetings. We use it for our demo meetings. So if somebody wants to schedule a demo meeting, a demo meeting with us, with Magda, my assistant, who’s a productivity expert and, Nozbe expert, all you have to do is go to Nozbe.com/demo and then just, schedule a meeting with her, you get a Calendly link. And when you do that, what happens is behind the scenes is that the moment you schedule a meeting with Magda, there is a task being created in our project. The project’s name is"Get a demo meetings". And in the section “Upcoming”, so in the upcoming meetings, there is a new event, new task from Calendly. Magda didn’t have to contact Calendly’s APIs. She’s not a programmer. She didn’t have to do anything, apart from just creating a filter inside of Gmail saying: whenever I get this email from Calendly, forward it to my email address of the “upcoming section” of my Get a demo meetings project. So it’s really, really useful and really cool because this way, she gets the task.

And what’s more? In the comments later, she writes notes from this meeting with this customer. And then she mentions us, like the marketing people, how the meeting went. And we can reply to her, we can, maybe suggest some ideas. So we can discuss this potential customer right here in Nozbe in tasks. So it’s really, really convenient. It’s really practical and it’s completely automatic.

Some of our customers are putting this to practice even better. So I’ll give you some examples in a few seconds. So how it’s done? Basically, she creates a filter in Gmail. So whenever there’s notifications from Calendly and there is a new event, then just forward it to my special email address. That’s it. That’s what she does. And it works really, really well. So this way she gets this. She gets the task with the comment right in her get a demo meetings project.

Some of our customers are taking this to a whole new level. So, for example, whenever they have, and we also do that, whenever we are using some online software and we are being built for it, because we also, we, Nozbe is a premium product. There’s a free version. There’s a premium and business tier. So people also pay us for Nozbe. Hopefully you listening are also a paying customer, but on the other hand, we are also using other, software products to run the company, and we also pay for it.And whenever we get an invoice, we are trying to send it automatically to our email address of our project that we’re sharing with our accounting firm.

This way, it automatically goes to the project, and we don’t have to do anything about it. It’s our way to send automatically invoices.

Our other customers have figured it out, especially, the cool thing about Nozbe is that we have customers from all over the world from different industries. And they are very often using very specialized software for whatever it is that they do. But very often this specialized software tries to be a jack -off -all -trades and then has some tasks, maybe projects, but they prefer to use Nozbe for that. They like our, simplified, our great interface to use Nozbe, to use for projects and tasks and to, manage, as I mentioned, their business and private life all in one app, while still using the core, features of this app for their industry, right? So what they do is they integrate with Nozbe, but instead of, asking us to write a special integration with their software or whatever, they just integrated using notifications, email notifications from that app. So if that app sends notifications, for example, that they have a new patient, or somebody updated some of their things in the patients, whatever, they get a notification, and this notification is being added to Nozbe as a task. This way they can follow up, see what’s going on or comment to it in Nozbe with their team and they didtalk about this customer here in this in this app this way everything is again being automated and also aand we’ve heard from many customers that they are using completely like software services that we we have never heard about or we have rarely heard about that now thanks to the unique email address to a project, a section, they can integrate without any knowledge of development, of programming, of anything like this. They just need to know the email address, added there, and it works, and it just works, which is really productive. So that’s the way. And even, as we are is for, thank goodness it’s Friday, for our Fridays, for our mighty Fridays. And as on Fridays in Nozbe, and if you don’t know, this is how we do Fridays. On Fridays in Nozbe, everybody in our team is welcome and is encouraged to do a weekly review. So to go through the projects, go through tasks, review everything. They’re encouraged to do that. And once they do it, then they can pursue, like, personal development. They can learn something new, read something, just, get better, level up. And very often what people do is they sign up to newsletters. And instead of reading them in their email client, they just put their Nozbe email address. So the newsletters get directly as tasks to Nozbe, And they can read the newsletters inside Nozbe and Mark Them has done and, read. So it’s also really convenient and really easy. it’s a good way to send things, to send things automatically to your reading list for Friday. So this way on Friday you have a reading list of things that interest you ready. this whole idea of Fridays in Nozbe is it comes from this fact that we prefer to work on day -to -day stuff like really effectively from Monday to Thursday and then like move stuff for personal development for Friday and this waywhen you get a very interesting article or very interestingYouTube video you can just send it to Nozbe and on Friday you’ll get back to it and you’ll read it you watch itin Nozbe in comments you can embed a youtube video very easily so it all works very well so this way again automatically you can have newslettersmaybe some some new videos um you can get all notified uhyou get tasks automatically in your um in your natsby so again This is the way of working with email. First, two -minute rule to make sure that you process email fast. So respond quickly. And if you won’t respond longer, forward it to your task manager. And the best way to process email is not to have to process it at all. So to use it within the team, within the team, stop using email. Just use NASB, share projects, tasks and comments. And then also with your clients, share projects, or join projects, or just task them. So even send tasks to your clients. So thanks to all that, you can be faster, more efficient. And next year, after your holidays, you will have fewer emails to process because everything will be in your productivity system. And I think this is the way. This is the way to have stuff in your productivity system and not worry about email and not stress about email after you’re back from holidays so this is myultimate piece of advice and if you want to learn more about Nozbe or you have been using Nozbe personal but you want to get to know new Nozbe or maybe you’re a long -time Nozbe personal user I love you but you want to migrate to the new Nozbe but you are afraid a little bit or need some guidance Talk to Magda. Schedule a demo. Add a task to her project right away. Basically, when you sign up for a demo with her, you will have added a task to her project. And she will be happy to not only show you how Nozbe works, but mostly how Nozbe can help your team or your company or yourself be more productive. Because what she does is she doesn’t have a template of, I mean, she has kind of a template what she wants to show you, but then she asks you about your industry, how you get stuff done, and she, the whole demo session is actually tailored to you. So make sure to check it out at Nozbe.com/demo. And also, if you want to have my latest book to 10 steps to ultimate productivity and at the webinar, make sure to send an email to support at Nozbe .com, and we will send you a copy very soon because it’s going to be available very soon to you. So that was it. This is how you deal with emails. This is how emails can be productive when they are fewer of them, when you process them using two -minute rule, and when you make sure that they are automated, that they work for you. So I think there is a way out of an email frenzy. There is a way out of email stress. there is a way. And I think this is the way. And if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below this video. I’ll be sticking around in the comments. And also, if you’re listening to an audio podcast, the show notes will have all the information you need, all the links you need to be able to use this information right now, productively. And if you want to, get back to me, write to Nozbe to support at Nozbe .com. If there is a message for Michael, just or feedback to no office podcast, it will be forwarded to me. I mean, the email will not be forwarded to me. The email will be in Nozbe as a task and I will receive this task. And this way I will be able to answer you quicker. So make sure to let me know if you liked us coming back and see you and hear you next, in two weeks on a Wednesday at 10 a .m. Eastern Time. This is Michael Sluinsky, CEO and founder of Nozbe, your productivity guide, your productivity student and a person that just loves helping smart, small business owners get their business and private life organized in a simple. our work and not be stressed about our work. Thanks.