I’m a huge fan of making my time as productive as possible. I don’t want to waste time in hunting down if someone has replied or try to add yet more things to my calendar just to try to remember something. I like quick and automated solutions.

When you send an email that you need a reply to, in Outlook you can do this:

• CC yourself
• In the message you sent yourself, add a reminder for that specific email at the time and date you desire
• Archive the email
• The reminder will pop up the email at your set time. If you have a response and are done with the email – just dismiss the message.
• If you do not have a response yet – the email is in front of you – so you can just forward the email with a quick note that you still need a response

With this method, there is no need to try and remember what you are waiting on – its your task list.

When I switched to Google apps, I lose this functionality. It is the single thing I miss the most about Outlook.

I was very happy to find a program that does the exact same thing for Gmail (and it works in Google apps), called Boomerang for GMail.

It’s a browser add on that you can install that adds another tab in your email. You can easily set a reminder that if no one responds by a specific date, put the email back in your inbox so that you can once again forward the email making sure that you get a response.

I find this is very useful for:

• Following up on invoices
• Getting responses from support you send off to other companies
• Getting responses from people on vacation
• Following up on project information (I prefer project management software for most of this)
• Making sure bugs are being reported and followed up on (although I prefer bug tracking software)
• Reminding clients to give you access to their systems
• Anything else you waste time on trying to track down if you have an answer or who is response for that answer

The plugin works with Google Apps, Gmail, Firefox, and Chrome.

There is both a free and paid version. They both have similar functionality, the difference is how many items can be stored in your boomerang queue, and how many systems it integrates with (Google Apps or Salesforce). 

It does have some mobile capabilities, but I find them pretty limiting at the moment as its not a fully integrated app (which it can’t be as GMail doesn’t allow that on mobile devices).

You can download it from Boomerang for Gmail.

Please note: This is not an affiliate link or a paid post. I’m just a happy customer (paying for it) and it’s a huge time saver.

Here’s a video about the program: