Likes & Launch

Mobile Inbox Hack: Create your own Text Expander

Photo and DIY vintage charger idea from Tidbits and Wine.

I’m guilty of checking my email within the first few minutes of waking up but I’ve found that I’m less likely to reply to those emails until I’m in the office. I’d like to think of it as a ‘light-weight’ way to ease into work in the morning but what it really comes down to is tools.

I try to take superior care of my biggest tool: my inbox. It’s a very powerful medium I use daily for getting things done.

I’m a big fan of google apps tools like appointment slots, canned responses, and boomerang for gmail. They help me get more repetitive tasks done quickly so I can get back to the good stuff.

The problem is, sending email from my mobile phone doesn’t have the extra features yet. Fortunately, I just learned at the recent USV Business Development Summit about a way to hack a ‘canned response’ or ‘text expander’ type tool into your iPhone or Android phone without a separate app.

iOS: Put autocorrect to work for you

Create keyboard shortcuts with common phrases is easier than I thought. On your iOS device go to:

Settings > General > Keyboard — Scroll down to “Add New Shortcut”

You’ll have the option to put in a phrase: this is where you can type or paste in the long text you would like to replace.

Using my calendar appointment slot hack as an example, I copy and pasted in my canned response (making sure not to hide the hyperlink):

Phrase: “Grab an appointment slot here: http://bit.ly/———. Please include your phone number in the invite.”
Shortcut: “ssched”

Now, whenever I type scched anywhere in my phone, autocorrect inserts the phrase above. Much faster!

Other things you can shortcut: address to your office, mailing address, conference call number, or a long website URL.

Android: Use Google Keyboard’s text expansion

Good news for Android users, no app is required if you use the Google keyboard. The process is similar to iOS. Android Police has done a great job of providing a step-by-step how to on the process here.

[http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/06/07/psa-the-google-keyboard-for-android-supports-text-expansion-heres-how-to-use-it/]

What other mobile inbox hacks do you use? Share with us in the comments or on twitter @br_ttany.

How early stage employees ask for help

You’ve been #hustling for the past year at your startup. Your team has doubled and doubled again. What was once ten people huddled in a makeshift office is now a group of fifty people collaborating to make this one idea into a ‘real company.’

Grind/Dream poster by Joey Roth.

You’ve never been more excited or more exhausted. You stop to look back at where you were a year ago and are shocked at how little you knew. You took on budget or human resources or design or mobile because someone had to do it. You stepped up to the plate and you did the best you could. You helped get the company where it is today. Although you probably don’t hear it as much as you’d like from your CEO, thank you. Thank you. You are a part of what got the company here today.

The high from looking how far you’ve come quickly wears off when you look back at your inbox. Messages about that upcoming deadline. More engineers coming on board but not enough budget to add more hires who aren’t building the core of the product. You’ve added two people to your team but you still feel like you’re absorbing every loose end. You are the person who took on every challenge before, so why should that change?

Yes, you’ve found yourself reading a blog post about employee burnout but then you catch yourself. Burnout is for other people. Burnout is for people who don’t sleep more than 4 hours a day. Hm, maybe you should read do a little research on how people get by with 4 hours of sleep, you could do that just for a little while, right?

NO! Less sleep is never (#hustle mindset: rarely) the answer. What you need help with is reprioritizing. You have too many things on your plate that you can no longer see what’s important. There is no way that you’re doing an excellent job at too many things. It’s impossible.

How do you prioritize when everything feels business critical? First, not everything is business critical, and if it is, then why aren’t any of the other 20-50 people on your team working on this? Everything is not business critical.

Take a deep breath. Say it with me now: “Everything is not business critical.” Repeat it until you believe it.

Now, how do you know what is business critical? Make a priority list by using three questions:

What am I working on?
What should I be working on?
What would I work on if I had more time?

Become an office space expert in 5 hours

When looking for office space, a growth mindset can be a huge time suck.

Startup Founders who want to find and secure office space on their own are at a disadvantage. There is a steep learning curve to get up to understand pricing, build relationships and foresee potential pitfalls. Even if you do get significantly up the learning curve, the opportunity to use that knowledge only happens every few years (at best).

Even if you have an expert on staff or a trusted broker, their services rarely apply when you’re opening an office in a new office. We’ve had a number of our portfolio companies open second offices in SF, NYC and London. It’s very rare to find an expert in all three markets.

The best strategy? Focus on finding trusted resources through referrals and get back to building your business.

If you are thinking of opening a new office but looking for advice? You’re in luck! Two of the experts in the USV Network, Alex Miller from Stack Exchange and real estate lawyer Jason Gelman, are taking their knowledge public in an upcoming Skillshare class:

How to Find, Negotiate and Build Out Your Perfect Office

If you haven’t visited Stack Exchange’s new office yet, you should attend this class just to see it. Beautiful space, amazing kitchen and private honeycomb offices for all engineers. Did I mention that they’re hiring?

If you’re looking for a smaller space or co-working space, we’ve started a public list of startup real estate resources in NYC. Additions welcome.

Don’t go it alone when opening a new office. Learn the basics, lean on experts and get back to work.

NYC Startup Office Space

One of the advantages of a close-knit startup community, whether through an incubators, venture capital firm, geographic community or otherwise, is that you have access to knowledge at scale.

Take office space decisions for example. Most startups don’t think of real estate decisions more than once a year. If you’re lucky, you don’t have to worry about it for a few years. It’s hard to keep a pulse on real estate offerings when it’s a decision you rarely think about it. Having peers who have recently gone through the process can be a huge advantage.

Working with 50+ growing companies through USV and the broader NYC tech community, I know a lot of companies who have recently looked for space or moved office spaces. Since I already have relationships with the startups (the demand side), it’s easier for me to reach out to the suppliers of office space, brokers, subleased spaces and coworking spaces, since I interact with them more frequently.

Being able to share that information quickly with our portfolio companies is an advantage if it gets them into space faster. However, hoarding that information limits the potential upside of additional knowledge. I believe the crowd knows far more than I could learn so hopefully we can work together to update this hackpad of NYC Office Spaces.

The list has a space to list temporary offerings like subleases or spare desks, as well as links to more permanent coworking spaces and contacts for real estate brokers who understand the need of startups.

Know of any good space for a team of 10? Leave a note in the comments or shoot me a tweet, @br_ttany.

Recycle, reduce, and reuse email

I spent a lot of time in my inbox so I am constantly looking for ways to make it more customized to my workflow. Although there is no silver bullet for inbox zero (except perhaps blinding deleting all emails each day), gmail labs and gmail plug-ins are a huge help.

Recycle old emails with Canned Responses

If you are constantly writing similar responses, why are you starting from scratch each time? Gmail Lab’s ‘Canned Response’ feature allows you to save the text you use most frequently in emails.

If you haven’t used Gmail Labs before, full tutorial here.

Types of canned responses I use at InclineHQ:
- How Incline works (explains what we do and why we do it)
- Confirming weekly speakers
- Accepting a new student to the next class
- On-boarding new hiring partners
- Weekly student feedback requests

Now instead of trying to think of all the scenarios upfront, save as you go. If you write an email this week you know you’ll use in the future, go to canned response and 'save new’ before you send.

Next time you write that email you can drop in the text you need and edit before sending. That way if you have to change any details (name of person or change of dates) you can do it quickly. It’s much faster than searching your inbox for an old email to copy and paste language.

I haven’t checked it out yet but Text Expander comes recommended from Alex Godin. It costs $35 but gives the added benefit of being able to use it outside email.

Reduce the amount of email you see with filters

Email is a fast, efficient, and widely adopted communication tool when you’re able to utilize it only to do things that add value.

Last week I wrote about one of my favorite Gmail hacks by using Google appointment slots to streamline scheduling meetings. Another favorite is Gmail Filters. I use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram often enough that getting an email notification for everything is redundant. Instead I only opt-into the notifications that I care about and have them all filter into a 'Social’ folder. For non-urgent email, I filter into a 'Read Later’, for articles, or 'Rodeo’, for long-term projects.

Thankfully, filter is now getting easier. This week Gmail announced teh launch of automatic filtering. Access will roll out to Gmail users in the coming weeks. (hint, hint: Google, I’d love to try it out.) Thanks Eric Radstake for the video below!

If you still have email that you delete every day or week - pledge to yourself that you’ll stop torturing your inbox and just unsubscribe. The company sending it can save the pennies it saves on sending it to you and may see an open-rate bump with a lower denominator.

Reuse more emails by setting up introduction context

Need an introduction or connection? Speed up the email-introduction process by providing what you need, why and how to get in touch.

Poor request:
Can you make that intro?

Name

Reusable request:
As we discussed on the phone, I’m interested in talking to companies that are looking for an iOS developer. I have 3 years of experience working at Company Y.

Here are the links for my portfolio, github and LinkedIn profile. I’ve applied to the company directly through their website but have attached my resume here.

Thanks,
Name, Email, Social Links

By setting up the context for the request, it’s easy to quickly forward the email instead of starting from scratch. Reusing email is a two-way street so trying to be mindful of setting it up on your end is essential. Canned responses can help here too!

What tools do you use to manage email?
Let me know on Twitter @br_ttany.

This is the second post on gmail productivity hacks. Read the first ToolsThursday post: Hack your google calendar.

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