If you have ever sent a very important email and then forgot to follow up, do not worry, you are not the only one. Most of the people working in the professional field have the same problem, which results in opportunities that go by unnoticed and deals that disappear. Even though Gmail has a snooze feature, its interface is not so user-friendly and the time slots that are pre-set hardly correspond to the way time is in the real world. So, the answer is a follow-up reminder tool that is aligned with the way your brain actually works in terms of time.
The Natural Language Solution
Simplehuman radically changes the way one sets up Gmail reminders by its revolutionary natural language feature. This feature allows you to arrange the next follow-up just by a few words indicating the time when you would like to get the email again. Instead of going through Gmail’s inconvenient dropdown menus and choosing random times like “Tomorrow 8 AM”, you just press B and enter expressions like “next Monday”, “after 3 PM today” or “in 3 days”. The tool immediately gets your idea and it is it who does all the date and time calculations.
Content wise this is similar to the procedure by which people generally process time. While reading an email you do not view it as an exact timestamp – rather you think in terms like “remind me about this after lunch” or “bring this back next Wednesday morning”. Simplehuman’s natural language processing removes the intermediate step of thinking about your intentions in terms of specific dates.
Why Simplehuman’s B Shortcut is Genius
The B shortcut of Simplehuman is not only quicker than the snooze option of Gmail but leads to quite a different concept of email timing altogether. The default Gmail snooze option is so inconvenient that most people do not even bother to use it, hence there remain a lot of emails in their inbox with the vague notion of ‘I will deal with this later’. By making the setting of reminders as simple as hitting a key and writing a natural language sentence, Simplehuman has totally overcome the problem of resisting user engagement.
Action reminders for emails that call for certain actions, e.g. one has to review some documents or make a phone call. Usually, such reminders are set for short time periods like “tomorrow morning” or “in 2 hours”.
Follow-up reminders for sent emails that are used to ensure that one has received a response. Also, these kinds of reminders normally imply long timeframes such as “in 3 days remind me about this”.
Reference reminders for giving information that is dependent on time, e.g. details of a meeting or a travel ticket. These kinds of reminders can be set by uttering something like “remind me on Tuesday”.
Simplehuman is different in that it does not require the user to work from another email client and also it does not demand the user to acquire a new skill. The command bar (⌘+K or Ctrl+K) is there whenever you want to quickly do any email actions, and if you want to learn more Gmail keyboard shortcuts, the small prompts will guide you at your own speed.
The Bottom Line
To put it simply, if professionals are fed up with follow-ups lost in the shuffle and important conversations slipping from their view, then Simplehuman is the most fitting solution with the least amount of resistance. Its natural language reminders can interpret timezone-aware expressions such as “this weekend” or “in 2 months”, hence the whole process becomes as easy as just telling a co-worker when to remind you. Complex follow-up mechanisms that require you to be mentally present in order to operate them, on the contrary, Simplehuman is very close to effortless operation – all that you need to do is hit B, type the time when you’d like the email back and wait for it to come through.
