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Harness Your Inbox to Seize the Day

Students are pushed and pulled in all different directions — with so many opportunities and responsibilities, it can be hard to keep track of your responsibilities while making progress on your goals. But, with Gmelius it’s possible to seize every day, no matter how busy you might be. Take Gwen, for example — a student part-way through university balancing classes, extra-curriculars, and internship-searching. Without an inbox-harnessing tool, Gwen’s life would be hectic, but with Gmelius she transforms every day into a productive one.

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9AM: Starting Off Strong

The first thing Gwen used to do in the morning was snooze her alarms, then scroll through her feed, and check her calendar — anything to avoid having to face the avalanche of emails that was sure to have hit her inbox overnight. Now, Gwen starts off her day by whittling her messages down to inbox zero, moving actionable emails to Kanban boards scheduling day-to-day tasks, and migrating purely informational emails to her project boards. Then, she heads out to catch up with a club co-president over breakfast. They’ve been hard at work planning an event, which entails wrangling an overflowing shared inbox filled with speaker confirmations, venue logistics, and registrant questions. Gwen delegates certain emails to her associates, along with due dates for their replies. Checking the event’s board, she sees that her co-president has checked off “Confirm venue” from their shared to-do list. Sure enough, Gwen finds the confirmation email at the top of the Venue board!

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2PM: Tackling the Future

During a spare hour in between classes, Gwen finds a spot at the library to set up a Sequence for connecting with job recruiters to find a summer internship. Writing the initial outreach template is the hardest part — Gwen’s grateful that with Gmelius’ template variables feature, she can duplicate this same message for her different contacts with only the click of a button. In less time than it takes for her friends to walk to class, Gwen has set up an action sequence that automatically follows up with a polite reminder to a recruiter if they have not responded within the week. Now, instead of keeping tabs on unopened threads, Gwen can take advantage of her newly freed time and search for more job opportunities. Pleased with an honest hour’s work, Gwen looks approvingly down on her “Working Woman in the Making” board, which she’s configured up to automatically store the recruiter responses.

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8PM: Hitting the Books

Gwen swings by a late night work session with her class project group. After opening her shared email label for the class — which filters information sent to to her project group without cluttering her inbox — Gwen finds that her TA has sent some extra study material for the midterm. Remembering a tip she heard from her professor during office hours, Gwen adds a shared note to the email so her friends are also looped in. Gwen can’t help but glance at an email she’d sent to a crush the day before, asking if he’d like to study together for the midterm. He’s read it — Twice in the last hour!

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1AM: Setting Up Success

Before heading to sleep, Gwen remembers that she emailed a question to her professor last week with a question in preparation for tomorrow afternoon’s lecture. Seeing that her professor hasn’t gotten a chance to read her email, Gwen quickly schedules a follow-up email on her Gmelius phone app to automatically send in the morning if her professor doesn’t respond before then. Tired after deftly managing everything the day threw her way, Gwen quickly falls asleep, ready for tomorrow.

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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either used in a fictitious manner, for the purposes of promoting Gmelius Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

The Crimson's news and opinion teams—including writers, editors, photographers, and designers—were not involved in the production of this article.