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I was saddened to receive this email yesterday (Nov 26, 2023). Dear Nudgers We are sad to say that despite the support we’ve received from you over the years, Nudgemail is losing money to operate. As much as the love we’ve had for this product has never stopped (we ourselves still use it to this day), we unfortunately cannot afford to support the efforts. Nudgemail will be shutting down in December – but with any luck this could be temporary. If you would like to remain notified if we have the capacity to resume in the future, please let us know here. In the meantime, ifRead More →

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After receiving yet another campus-wide meeting invitation for an event in an ongoing series that I am never going to attend, I decided I was done manually processing these invitations. By manually processing, I mean, clicking “decline.” Every. Single. Time. Unfortunately, there is not a way (yet?) to tell Outlook to automatically decline meeting invitations from specific people or with specific words in the subject line, so we have to cobble together a few things to 1) delete the meeting invitation as soon as it arrives, 2) hide the unaccepted/undeclined meeting invitation from Outlook calendar, and 3) for those who synch their Outlook calendar withRead More →

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Faculty seem to always be thinking about the best way to communicate with our students. While most academics still live inside of our email, most of our students do not. Some instructors use Remind or Slack to message their students, and both are good solutions. Both also require students to install an app on their device, and then a bit of instruction on how to use it. As we’re about to start a new quarter here in the Pacific Northwest—a quarter that will be entirely online—the question of how best to contact students has risen to greater importance. A special shout out to my colleagueRead More →

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As my colleagues at semester institutions are trying to finish out their terms and those of us on quarters are gearing up for the start of the spring term during this time of coronavirus online education, email management is more important than ever. Much more of our communication with colleagues will be through email. And, more importantly, the primary way—or, in some cases, the only way—students will have to contact us, their professors, is through email. That means that it is more important than ever that we practice good email hygiene: responding to what needs responses, deleting what needs deleted, filing what needs filing, andRead More →

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A veteran colleague recently advised a newly-hired professor to not send students email at 1 am. Why? Because students will come to expect that all of their professors will respond to their email inquiries at 1 am. I don’t know if that’s true, but another colleague replies to messages late at night but delays sending them until the morning for that very reason. Outlook comes with the ability to delay sending emails. Gmail can do it with an add-in. Gmail users: Install Boomerang. (Try the pro version for free for 30 days. After that, use the pared-down free version or pay $4.99/month for more features.)Read More →

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[Update 7/1/2015: Super.cc appears to be no more.] In academia, email continues to be our primary means of communication. Since this is where we spend most of our working hours, it makes sense that we use email to keep our lives sorted. For email messages I want to follow up on, I forward them to followup.cc. For email messages I need to do something with, I forward them to Trello, my preferred task management system. And this is why I’m excited about the newest addition to my email arsenal: Super.cc. Now I can use email to add appointments to my Google calendar. Signing up. GoRead More →

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Your computer files. Are they locked away from prying eyes? Are they backed up? Are they backed up offsite, away from fire and flood danger? For the most part, I don’t have super-secret data on my computer. I teach psychology. My work computer is a laptop that I tote around with me. I have never had my laptop stolen, but that was true for everyone who had their laptop stolen for the first time. Security I already have in place If I left my computer sitting on the roof of my car, it blew off on the 405 and rendered junk by a passing Kenworth,Read More →

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My favorite email reminder service, FollowUp.cc (see this blog post), has just added a new tool to their arsenal. For those not familiar with the service, you send an email to, say, Tuesday@followup.cc, and Tuesday morning, you will receive that email. Jan12@followup.cc would return that email to you on January 12th. This is my “tickler” file. Anything I want to follow up on later gets sent to FollowUp.cc. I use this, for example, to remind me of conference registration deadlines. If early bird registration ends on October 30th, I’ll send a FollowUp email to Oct20@followup.cc with the body of the email containing the link toRead More →

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Did you know that if you type mailto: in your browser’s address bar and press enter, your default email program will give you a compose screen? [Thanks to a LifeHacker reader for this tip!] Want to do it even faster? With your browser screen open, CTRL-L will take your cursor to the address line, and highlight it. Just type mailto: and press enter. Even faster? Using Shortmarks.com (see this blog post), create a new Shortmark with ‘m’ (or whatever you’ll remember as the keyword. For the direct link, type ‘mailto:’. Then save. Now, just typing m in the address bar and pressing enter is enoughRead More →

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Did you know that you can ‘import’ a gmail message into a new Google calendar event? Did you know that what most of us call appointments, Google calls events? “I have an event scheduled with my dentist.” That makes it sound way more serious than an annual checkup should sound. I don’t really know what ProjectX is, but it certainly sounds worthy of the “event” designation, however. Here I’ve received a message about needing to meet to discuss ProjectX in my gmail account. When I click on the “More” button, I get a dropdown menu where I can select “Create event.” This generates a newRead More →