Archive for category: How To

Something came up twice today, so I just had to write about it. It’s all about more effective email and calendar invites. Sounds boring, I know… But trust me, if you adopt these ideas, you might even get compliments from people about your emails and calendar invites. Here we go!

A Helpful Email Subject Can Move You to the Head of the Line

Whenever I send an email to someone I don’t know very well, I always include “Blue Gurus” or “Jason Terry” in the subject. Why? Because most people use their inbox as their TO DO list. I want my email to stand out in that list. So I include my name or company name, and it really works. I’ve had people comment on it many times.

Here are two examples:
“Blue Gurus – Proposal for your new website attached!”
“Jason Terry – The insurance paperwork you requested is attached.”

The people on the receiving end will read it and hopefully take action right away. But that doesn’t always happen. So when they look back through their “read” emails later that day, mine will stand out. It works, I promise.

If It’s Not on the Calendar, It Doesn’t Count

This is something that has been really helpful in my business and personal life. On the business side, I have a lot of things going on… just like you. So I really have to use my calendar effectively or things get missed or I have lots of conflicts.

It’s embarrassing and unprofessional to miss an appointment with someone. And that almost never happens to me because I’m disciplined about sending calendar invites for just about everything. If I need to be somewhere, or it’s important to get something done that day, it goes on my calendar.

And on the personal side, my wife Trista and I used to have lots calendar challenges. This was years ago… and it was a real problem for both of us. We finally shared our electronic calendars and agreed, “if it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t count!” This put a stop to most of the issues we had with work, date nights, social events, family gatherings, vacation, etc.

Be Clear About Purpose or Goals with Calendar Invites

I love this best practice. And this is one of the things that came up today that inspired this story.

My friend Michelle Keller at Swope Health Services sent me an agenda for our monthly meetings. I wrote back and complimented her for being so organized (which isn’t surprising because she’s a communications professional.) She told me that she generally doesn’t accept calendar invites that don’t have a purpose or agenda included in the Title or Description of the invite. That made sense to me. I usually include the purpose or task list in calendar invites I send… but not all the time.

I’m going to try to do a better job with this moving forward. Even if that’s just a few bullet points that are important to cover with the people I’m meeting with. That will be more effective than just winging it.

Here’s an example:
When I send a calendar invite to someone to meet for coffee, I could just title it “Coffee” and add the people I want to invite and click Send. But I want to be more helpful than that, especially if it’s the first time I’m meeting them. A much better title would be, “Sarah and Jason – Meeting of the Minds”.

• This reminds both us who we’re meeting. It’s easy to forget when you are busy or if it’s the first thing on a Monday morning.
• I choose to put their name before mine to be respectful… it’s just a nice touch.
• Personally, I would look forward to a “Meeting of the Minds” more than I would a “Coffee”.
• I often include my cell phone number after my name in the subject. If they’re running late, they can easily call me to let me know.

So there you have it. And I don’t think this subject is talked about enough. (See what I did there?) I really hope you got at least one thing you can use from Email and Calendar Subjects that Move the Needle. If you have any best practices with your email subjects or calendar invites, let me know!

By Jason Terry, with another solution to a problem that has been nagging him for a long time! Picking the email address to use for a contact in a Google Contact Group.

Do you use Google Contacts to keep track of all the people you know? If not, then you can move on to the next thing in your day… thanks for reading!. :)

For those of you that DO use Google Contacts, you’re probably aware that you can create a Contact Group. This is really handy when you find yourself emailing the same group of people a lot. For example, I’m involved in a few peer advisory groups. And the blog teams for our clients. These are groups of people that I email on a regular basis. And I’ve set up Google Contact Groups for all of them.

Before I go into picking the email address for each person in a Google Contact Group, I will quickly show you how to set up Google Contact Groups.

Setting up a Google Contact Group

1. Log into your Google Contacts
2. Click on any of your contacts.
3. You will see a button (like in the screenshot, labeled Groups) that has a three-headed group icon. Click it.
4. In the drop down, you can create a new group or assign the contact you’re currently looking at to one of the existing groups in the list.
5. If this is the first group you’ve created, click Create New.
6. A new dialog pops up where you can type in the Group Name. Do that. Then click OK.
7. And now the group will show up in your list of groups. Click the checkbox next to the group you just created to add your current contact to the group and click Apply. (This is an easy step to miss… you have to click Apply to actually save the group affiliation.)

Sending a Group Email

Once you’ve set up a Google Contact Group, all you have to do to send a group email is start a new email. In the “To” field start typing the group name, and when it shows up, click on it. The “To” field will then be filled out with all the contacts in your group! It’s that easy. And really useful.

Here’s the Problem…

Many of the people in my contacts have a work email address and a personal email address. And when I send group emails, they usually have a strong preference about which email I use for group communications. But for some reason, Google would just pick an email address. Sometimes it was the right one, and sometimes not. This ended up being a manual process for me to fix… silly, right?

The Solution

There’s an easy fix, that I guess should’ve been obvious to me… but it wasn’t. Refer back to the screenshot above. Do you see the second arrow labeled “Choose Email” that points to a little drop down icon next to the group name? All you have to do to pick exactly what email address you want to use for that group is click the drop down. All of the contact’s email addresses will show up in the list, and you can pick the one you want to use for the group. (Important: You have to click Apply for the change to be saved.)

And that’s it! I’ve gone through all of my contact groups and chosen the correct email addresses for each person in my groups. It’s a small thing, but it was really annoying to manually fix when sending a group email. You might have already known about this solution, but I’m sure some people missed it like I did.

If you didn’t know about this setting in Google Contacts or you found this blog post helpful, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment or shoot me an email… I would really appreciate it! Thanks for reading!