We come now to section five of the Inbox Overhaul: Timeshifting Email. And I'm very excited to share timeshifting with you because I found in my work with tons of clients who need help with their email— that almost nobody knows about the possibilities of timeshifting email. And once you discover these possibilities you will wonder how you ever got through your inbox without the ability to time shift or snooze an email here is what this is for and how it works now because email is asynchronous we are getting messages at a time other than the exact moment that we need to deal with them. People send us things in advance and then we decide when to follow up with those messages that people send us. Sometimes we need to make a decision. Sometimes we need to take action, but what we don't need to do is let that email sit in our inbox forever. But we also don't want to just archive it and hope that we remember it later. We don't want to lose track of that email forever, but at the same time if we just leave everything in our inbox until we deal with it that's how we get in this situation where we have 10 000 unread emails in our inbox. So here is how timeshifting works.

First, you simply decide when you want to see that email again. You forward it to a certain service that will send it back to you at a certain time and date, and then you archive the original message. So it's simply a three-step process: Decide when you want to see it again. Forward the message to the appropriate address, and then archive it. And here's how it works with the service that I use which is called followupthen.com. And they have a shortened web address, fut.io—so you can very quickly forward an email even from your mobile device. The way this works is it's entirely email-based. It doesn't require an integration with your employer's email system. It doesn't require a certain app. It doesn't require a certain device. It is completely independent of all of those. It works only over email and it works through forwarding. There are a couple of other services that work this way. Some of them are more of a Gmail extension or a plug-in. I like followupthen.com because it works with everything. Now it's not a free tool, but it is one of the most valuable productivity tools that I have ever used, so I think it's well worth paying for. Here's how it works. You simply forward the message to an address like tomorrow at followupthen.com or the short version fut.io, and whatever is before the @ symbol is the specific time or date that you are specifying when you want to receive that email back. And this particular service will recognize a ton of different formats both absolute and relative dates and times it'll recognize recurring dates and times and you can see all of these at followupthen.com/how.

But just a couple of examples that I've got on the screen here. You can say send this back to me in one year— 1year@fut.io you can give it a specific date like Jan1 for January 1st. You can give it a specific time or a time and date like 4 p.m or 2pmMonday@fut.io or you can even have it figure things out for you. Like 2ndFriday or 8am2ndFriday. You can combine these in any way you want to very quickly and—without having to consult a calendar— get that email back at exactly the time and date that you want it. So lots and lots of different options. Again followupthen.com/how illustrates this really well. They also have some additional advanced features. I don't use all of these but they have response detection so you can—tell the service can tell—if someone else has gotten back to you and remind you to follow up with them if they haven't. You can set recurring reminders if there are recurring tasks that you need to do at a certain time every week. You could use your calendar for that, of course, but sometimes it's better to have the email that has specific information— maybe login information in it.

And you can also use Follow Up Then for tasks. although I recommend other apps for tasks. So what are some situations where you might want to timeshift a particular email so you can get it out of your inbox now but not forget about it—not lose track of it? Well let's say someone sends you an agenda for a meeting that's coming up. If the meeting is on Friday you can forward it to 4pmThursday@followupthen.com and you'll get that email back right before you need to have it in hand. Maybe you need to solve a problem with someone who's absent today? Maybe they're not here, you can't work with them, you can't contact them but you know they'll be on Thursday so you forward it to Maybe there is a decision that you'll need to make in the future but you're not ready to make that decision yet, for example, maybe you got an invite to a conference and that conference is coming up in a couple of months and you're not quite ready to make a final decision yet well you can forward that to 1month@followupthen.com and then that email will come back to you and you'll realize, oh yeah I need to make a decision about that conference. And that way you're not relying on other people to follow up with you. If you think they might not or you think you might lose track of it that way, you can make sure that you see it again. This also works if you have put the ball in someone else's court and you're worried that they're going to drop the ball. If you are worried that they are not going to get back to you, you can send an email to them but bcc followupthen.com so that you get a reminder.

Again you can use response detection for that as well, so you don't get a reminder if they have gotten back to you. You can use it for an ongoing situation that you need to monitor. Maybe you're just kind of keeping an eye on something, oh, have we had any more complaints about this? You can give yourself a reminder and see that and think, "oh yeah, we haven't had any more issues with that so I'm going to let it go or maybe I do need to uh to do something about that." You can also use timeshifting and services like followupthen.com to put off a task, to kind of postpone that task, but of course there we've got to be careful about procrastination. The goal here is not to just constantly snooze all of these different reminders so that we have reminders coming in at all times of the day and night.

The goal here is to send that email into the future at a specific time and date when you will be more capable of dealing with it, but you don't want to put off the initial triage decision about delete, delegate, defer or do. You really want to make that initial triage decision on the spot and then snooze that email if you need to to a specific time in the future when you can actually deal with it. If you overdo this, if you use it as a procrastination tool, it's just going to create additional clutter from all of those reminders. And it may be that if you're repeatedly snoozing something, you might just need to make a decision about it or you might need to schedule time on your calendar or you know talk with a particular person to get that handled. But I've fallen into this trap personally, several times when using timeshifting and you just want to be careful about procrastination but I want to give you the encouragement and the opportunity to give this a try.

So very quickly if you want to pause this video right now, go to your email, just fire up a new email and send it to 1min@followupthen.com and all kinds of abbreviations will work. I think 1min is one minute. 1m might be one month, but give that a try and what they will do is they will actually send you an email back with full instructions on how to use the service, how to sign up. Very, very easy to get started with and one of my top recommendations for email productivity.