This episode focuses on two powerful features of Gmail that can help you save time and work more efficiently: Gmail templates and scheduling meetings directly within Gmail. Kristen Fitch guides listeners through the process of creating and using email templates, allowing you to reuse messages for common communications without rewriting them each time. Additionally, she explains how to seamlessly schedule meetings by integrating Gmail with Google Calendar, making it easier to coordinate with others. Kristen also shares tips on optimizing Gmail settings to enhance your email experience, including managing reply behaviors and utilizing Smart Compose. As the holiday season approaches, this episode aims to equip you with practical tools to streamline your email tasks and free up more time for what you love.

Connect with Kristin or book a Tech session (offering both individual and business sessions)

https://kristinfitch.com/tech

Takeaways:

• Gmail templates help save time by allowing users to create and reuse email drafts.
• Scheduling meetings directly from Gmail integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar and saves time.
• Important Gmail settings include enabling grammar suggestions and adjusting reply behaviors for efficiency.
• Using starred emails helps keep track of important messages without cluttering your inbox.
• You can convert emails into tasks, making it easier to manage follow-ups and deadlines.
• The ability to forward emails as attachments simplifies sharing important information with others.

Gmail tips, Gmail features, email templates, scheduling meetings in Gmail, Google Calendar integration, Gmail settings, time-saving email tricks, Gmail productivity tips, using Gmail for business, email organization, Gmail advanced features, Gmail productivity hacks, email management, Google Workspace tips, email efficiency, Gmail for non-techies, Gmail help, tech tips for beginners, mastering Gmail, email automation

Hey, hey.

And welcome back to Tackling the Tech.

This is your host, Kristen.

In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through a few Gmail features that are going to help you save time and work smarter.

Hey there, friends.

Welcome to Tackling the Tech, the show for all of us who don't consider ourselves tech geniuses.

I'm your host, Kristen Fitch, a tech savvy guide with 20 years of experience making tech simple and helping you master it with ease.

Each week, I'll guide you through simple.

Tips, tools and tricks to master your.

Gadgets, apps, and even AI without all the confusing jargon.

From organizing your phone and conquering Gmail to using AI tools that save you hours, we're here to help your tech work for you so you can spend more time doing what you love.

So grab your coffee, your devices, and let's tackle your tech together because you've got this.

Hey, hey.

Let's dive right in.

All right, so today's episode is all about using some of the Google products or offerings.

So we're going to focus on a few of the features of Gmail and with that, one of the features we're going to talk about is also if you're using Google Calendar.

So that's what we're going to dive into today.

We're going to keep this as a pretty short episode as we're getting into the holidays.

I know we're all busy and we have extra things to do.

So I just want to get straight to the features that I think are worth your time to learn and start using.

The top two features that I want to walk you through today are using Gmail templates and your email emails and then also how you can schedule meetings now in Gmail directly.

Now, lots of us, if we're using Gmail for business, we may already be using a calendar scheduling app like Calendly or Honeybook, or there's lots of other ones.

But if you're not doing that and you just want to keep things simple and not add any additional costs, then whether it's for personal or business reasons, then Gmail will now let you schedule meetings straight in the emails.

So we're going to focus on those two things today, templates and then scheduling a meeting.

But before we do that, I just want to go over with you a few settings that you can make sure you have set to on and Gmail to make sure you're really optimizing using email program.

So the first thing you're going to do is open Gmail and when you do.

At the very top right hand corner of Gmail, you're going to see your user icon or your user image.

So that's a picture view or maybe your initials and there's a couple other graphics.

One is nine dots basically.

And that's all of Google's accounts.

But you don't want to click on that one.

You want to click on 1, 1 or 2 over and it looks like the cog wheel and if you put your mouse over it, it'll say settings.

I want you to click on that.

That is specifically for Gmail.

Gmail settings.

All right, so once you're there, there are all these different labels at the top under settings.

So it's general and labels, inbox, accounts and imports and so on.

You get the point.

So what we're going to do is I just want to tell you a couple things that you really want to make sure you have on.

And so some of the ones that I make sure they're clicked now, yours may be clicked on, but they're things that you just want to check because it'll help you use Gmail just at a higher level.

So the first thing is it says default reply behavior.

Do you want to reply or reply to all?

When you reply back to a group email, I have reply all selected.

Now I can always change that when I'm sending the email to just say reply, not reply all.

But this will be my default.

Okay, the next thing down is you can make sure that your grammar and spelling and autocorrect are on whichever one or all of those that you want on.

So I have them all set to on or suggestions on.

Now they also have something called Smart Compose, which is basically predictive writing.

So if you start writing something that is a pretty standard sentence, it'll start trying to fill in the rest of the sentence or the word for you.

You can have that on or off, it's up to you.

Okay, the next thing is Conversation view.

Some people don't like the way that Gmail nests their emails.

And so you can either have the conversation view on or off.

And it explains it as it sets whether emails are the same topic or grouped together or not.

So I have it to off because I just want to see every email.

I don't want it to be nested underneath the first email, but some people like that.

Okay, the next thing that I want to make sure that you do is you can change your signature if you keep scrolling down under general.

So you can change it here or you can have more than one signature so you can add new signatures, and then you can have your email address default.

So I have multiple email addresses in my Gmail that I use, and so I just pick which one I want.

So that's probably the main things you want to check if you've never done it.

There is also a vacation responder under General.

It's at the very bottom of this page that if you're going on vacation, you can set a subject, a message, and then the date you'll be gone.

Okay, we want to talk about templates now, what that is and how to use them.

In order to do that, we first have to under Settings, go to the Advanced.

You know, click on Advanced up at the top.

And the second or third option is called Templates.

Turn frequent messages into templates.

To save time, you need to enable that.

So go ahead and enable that and then save changes.

Okay, after you do that, we can go ahead and get out of Settings.

So you can just click into your inbox.

All right, so what we're going to do is I'm going to show you how you can create a template and then use templates.

So when you're in your Gmail and you can see all of your messages, you're going to go ahead and click Compose, because we want to do a new message.

So once you do compose, you can see the two in the subject and where you can type in the body of the email.

What you're going to do is you're going to go ahead and type in a subject and the body of an email.

Now think about something that you send regularly.

This could be to a client.

It could be maybe it's a volunteer work you do or something like that.

So for my podcasts, I have templates for being a guest and all the steps and things that we need to happen with a guest before a guest comes on the show.

I also have a podcast template for when an episode is going to come out with a guest on it.

It lets them know all of the information about their episode.

And so what I do is I put all the information that's repeatable into my subject and my email.

Okay, so that's what you're going to do, is you're just going to type an email like you normally would.

So type in a subject and an email, delete any signature information, because we're about to save this as a template, and we don't want to bring that with us.

And so what you're going to do is once you're happy with your email subject, and then the body of the email.

At the very bottom of your popup email that you're working on, there are three dots.

And for most of you, it's going to be to the right of this blue send button, and it's going to be to the far right of the text and the attachment and the link icons and all of that.

You're going to click the three dots, which is more options.

When you do that, the second thing says templates.

You're going to click on that and then you're going to say, when you do, it opens up, if you have templates, and then it opens up one that says save draft as template.

And so that's what you're going to do or save.

And then actually it lets you save as a new template.

So that's what you want to do.

You're going to name the template.

And so in this case, if I was doing a new template for tackling the podcast guest, I would then name it, be a podcast guest on tackling the tech, and I would save that.

Okay, so that's how you create a template.

Now, let's say that you're going through this, but you realize later, oh, I need to add more information.

It's no problem.

You just create a new email, the subject in the body, you go back to those three icons, click on templates, and when you say save draft as template, you can actually replace it.

You can replace one of the ones above.

Just click on it and it will say, overwrite saved template, and then that will replace the original template that you worked on.

Okay, so like I said, you want to create templates for anything that you're sending more than once.

Let's say it's a sales, you know, a sales inquiry, or maybe some.

Someone's reached out to you about your services.

So you want to create an email that whenever someone reaches out to you, you start with that template, and then you just customize it to their name.

And then maybe specifically what they asked you, you're not retyping all of the other information.

So how do you go ahead and add a template to an email?

Well, you would go ahead and go to compose again a new do a new compose or email, open that up.

You're going to click those three dots again at the bottom, go into templates, and then you'll see at the very top, when you click templates, it says insert template.

You're just going to click on the template that you want to be added to this new email.

When you do that, then you can customize the email, you can change the subject, then you'll add who the recipient is, who's it going to, and it can go to more than one person.

And then you'll just customize any little parts that you need to, for instance, putting their name in the email.

So this is how you can very easily set up templates and then when you're an email, you just click on templates and add it to your new email.

It's super easy and it saved me so much time.

Now yes, there's other ways to create whole systems and templates.

For instance, I do use an online app or program called honeybook honeybook.com and it does scheduling, contracts, invoices, all sorts of things, but it's much more complicated.

And so while it's an amazing low price point product that lets you do a lot of stuff, it's basically like a content relationship management program.

Not everybody's wanting to learn something new like that or go and do all of those.

They don't want all those bells and whistles.

So if that's you, then doing using the Gmail templates is a game changer because it will save you time and, and you're not rewriting over and over the same information.

So I highly recommend going and playing with the templates and just trying it out.

And like I said, you can always save over top of a template that your first one maybe isn't exactly what you want.

So that's probably the top thing that you can save money in Gmail of a feature you may not be using.

The next one is that you can now schedule a meeting directly between Gmail and your Google Calendar.

So how we do that is we click compose.

So you start open a new email, you're going to go to those same three dots at the very bottom of your email new message, you know, when you click that at the very bottom it will say set up a time to meet and then you can click create an event or offer times.

You're free.

So that's the one that I'm recommending for most things.

Because if you're going to email somebody about asking them when they have, you know, the availability or I'm sorry, you're going to tell them when you have availability and let them schedule a meeting with you.

Then you want to pick offer times, you're free.

When you click that, it will actually open up your Google Calendar in the right hand side of your Gmail.

So it's on the right hand side.

It basically takes up a, I don't know let's say a one, two, I don't know, fifth or sixth of the screen.

And so what you can do is one of two things.

Either at the top of the calendar it says calendar and the date.

And then it gives you the hours.

You can either click into the hours in your calendar and then you just highlight the hours that you're available for each day.

So it shows me Thursday the 12th, right now, because I was already in this.

So I can highlight two hours or four hours that I'm available and then I can use the arrows at the top side today or the calendar date and then I can highlight hours on the next day.

Okay, and so that's what you're saying you're available.

Or at the bottom of this calendar, you know, the right hand side calendar area, it will say there's a gray, a gray area.

And then it says find times you can meet.

How long is the meeting?

You can say 1 hour, 30 minutes, however long.

And then availability, it lets you just put in the hours, you can type it in for the dates.

And then at the very bottom it says add a date.

You can add additional dates that you want to offer that person to meet with you and then the hours for that date.

So that is how you would then set what days and times that you're offering the person to have a meeting with you that they can pick one of those times.

And when they get the email and they click on it, then they're going to get to schedule a meeting and it will go directly onto your Google Calendar.

So that is another great time saving feature of Google Calendars and Gmail.

And I think they're both so powerful if you're not already using them.

Okay.

Three other things that I'm just going to highlight, I'm not going to walk you through necessarily in Gmail are the following.

If you are in your Gmail and you can see all of your emails, you know, in your primary inbox, promotions and such, at the very top, there's three dots.

It's right below the search mailbox area.

Click those dots and one you can forward as an attachment.

So if you click on an email, do that because I want to walk you through it.

You can make that email in attachment in your, excuse me, in an email to someone else, which is amazing because you don't have to copy and paste it, it will literally save it for you.

The entire email as an attachment.

That's a huge time saver.

And there are some cases where you really want to do that.

You want to send Somebody or you want to, especially if it's for work or you want to keep a record of something, it'll let you keep it that way with one click.

How easy is that?

You literally just click on the email first and then say, forward as attachment.

Okay.

And then the next one is, sorry, let me click here.

I use the stars in Gmail all the time.

And by that I just mean that when I'm looking at all my emails in my inbox, if it's important and I want to come back to it, but I don't necessarily, necessarily need to label it or move it to a folder yet, I will just star those.

You know, I'll click the star beside the name of the email or who it's from, and then I can later go to my starred emails.

And the only thing I put in my starred emails are things that I want to see again or come back to easily, because the only things in there are either from people I've worked with, people maybe that are podcast guests, and then important emails of things that I want to read or come back to.

And so that's probably something a lot of you are using, but if you're not, it makes it so much easier to find things and not have to sift through all of your inbox.

Okay, so that's another really small, easy thing that some of you are probably doing, but some of you might not be doing yet.

Okay.

The next thing is the last thing that I'll share about Gmail is you can also create an email into a task.

And what does that mean?

So if you click on an email of something that you want to create a task for, just click on a specific email by clicking the check box to the left of it.

And then at the very top under search mail, there's the small icons.

There's one, it's kind of in the middle, and it's a circle with a checkbox and a plus.

And if you mouse over it, it says add to tasks.

If you click that, it'll open up your taskbar on the right hand side of your emails and then you're able to see what it says, which is basically it'll say the subject of the email, then it will let you also then click it and then add details and a date by which you want to finish this task or leave a note about it.

So that's also super helpful for certain types of emails or something you want to remember to do, even if it's just respond to that email by, let's say, end a week or something like that.

Or tomorrow.

All right, so that is what I want to share with you about Gmail.

As I said, it's a super short episode.

I just wanted to share a couple of those features with you in case you're not already using them.

They are definitely ones to consider.

And as you know, I'll be bringing guest experts on in the coming weeks, especially by January, and we're going to share content and all sorts of tech things and best products and recommendations and all sorts of things.

So I can't wait to be back here with you.

I hope you have a great week.

Until next episode.

Thanks again for listening to Tackling the Tech.

If you have a suggestion for a tech topic you'd like us to cover, or you have a specific question, head on over to KristenFitch.com Tech then let me know.

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