My New Email Strategy and a Tip to Make Siri Useable

Have you ever missed an important email on your iPhone or iPad? In the flood of incoming emails busy entrepreneurs can easily skip over an important email. In my case, it’s almost always an email alerting me to a voicemail at the office or on my cell phone. At the office, I get an email from our ShoreTel voicemail system alerting me to a voicemail. I can play the voicemail directly from the email link. On my cell, I use Google Voice to get transcripts of my voicemails sent to my email – I never check my voicemail inbox. The downside of relying on emails to get voicemails is that I often skip over them on my phone. I’ve also missed important emails from my partners or family members – not all senders of email are ranked the same in my life (and in yours, no doubt).

Apple released the VIP inbox feature with IOS 6 and it’s pretty handy in making sure the important people in your life get priority treatment in your email inbox. If you click on All Mailboxes within your iPhone email, you’ll see a box called VIP. If you click VIP, it gives you the option of ranking certain of your contacts as VIP’s. After you’ve designated which of your contacts are VIP’s, all emails from that sender will be routed to your VIP mailbox. They also go to your regular inbox with a star next to them. You can also add a notification chime for all VIP’s. It takes less than 2 minutes to create your list of VIP’s and you’re much less likely to miss an important email on your iPhone.

I’m hoping that the notification system will empower me to stop constantly checking my email and become more productive in my work life and more present in my family time…we’ll see.

One other tip: add nicknames to your most frequent cell phone contacts. Go to Contacts, Edit Contact, Add a field, Add Nickname. After you’ve added a nickname, you can tell Siri to call the nickname and she’ll have a near-perfect track record of recognizing the name and calling the correct person. It’s made Siri useable for me.

Tim O’Loughlin

Eastward Capital Partners

432 Cherry Street

West Newton, MA 02465

o: (617) 762-3611

c: (617) 947-6272

http://www.eastwardcp.com

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Eastward Capital Partners – providing $1 – 10 million venture debt, growth capital and equipment financing to venture-backed, emerging growth companies since 1994. We also provide expansion capital to non venture backed companies.

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