Become the Boss of Your Email with SaneBox (Sponsor)

Did you know that the snooze button isn't only for your alarm clock? With SaneSnooze, you can snooze on your emails as well. SaneBox, this week’s sponsor at MacSparky, helps me prioritize my email with the SaneSnooze feature.

There are emails that you don’t have to act on right now, and that’s where SaneSnooze comes in handy. I can snooze the less important emails until I want to respond. The email disappears from my main inbox. Not delete disappear, but more of a I’ll-deal-with-it-later situation because SaneSnooze will hide the email until the time I say I’m ready for it to show back up in my inbox, and I can give it my attention when I’m ready to deal with these kinds of emails.

And SaneBox lets you choose how long you want to snooze. You can set your Snooze Folders to SaneTonight, SaneTomorrow, SaneNextWeek, SaneNextMonth, or whatever you think works best for you. When you move an email to your chosen SaneSnooze time, that email will disappear from your inbox, and then SaneBox will move that email back into your inbox at the time you’ve designated it. Want to deal with email on your terms? Click here to sign up for a free trial, and you can get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription. 

SaneBox (Sponsor)

My thanks to MacSparky’s sponsor this week, SaneBox. My plate is full enough as it is, but I’ve got SaneBox to help me clear my plate by managing my inbox. I’ve tried using rules before, but things would slip through that weren’t supposed to, so rules didn’t work for me. What works for me, what does the work for me, is SaneBox. It takes some training, but SaneBox manages the emails that I don’t need to read immediately and moves these distractions into folders like SaneLater, and moves the unwanted and annoying ones into SaneBlackHole.

If you’re looking to manage your workflow more productively, try SaneBox with a free trial. You'll get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription. Don’t waste your time on the clutter and unimportant emails. Spend time on working on what are actually your priority messages and what’s important to you. 

Time Track with Timing (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by the Timing App, the time tracking app that tracks time for you automatically. It’s that “automatic” part you should really pay attention to. Because I do so much work at my Mac these days, I’ve been using Timing and it is really nice being able to have the application keep track of exactly how long I spent in this Word document or on that Website. It makes my time tracking data so much easier (and more accurate).

Also, the app recently got a new “Activities” screen which gives you everything you need to know including App usage and project time spent. Other new improvements include the ability to start and stop timers right inside the app and growing support for automation. For instance, I’m working on a Shortcut that will call out to the Timing web API and automatically start and stop timers from my iPhone and iPad. (It’s still a bit ugly but I’ll share it here soon.) If you’re curious, you can get started with Timing’s  web app to track time from anywhere, and combine that with Timing’s sample Siri shortcuts to start and stop timers as quickly as possible. 

If you want simple, accurate time tracking data and you work on a Mac, look no further. You can download the free 14-day trial today and get 10% off for the first year.

Daylite: A Superior CRM for the Mac (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite, which also sponsored this week's Focus Mode webinar. Daylite has been the definitive CRM solution on the Mac for a long time. While most CRMs these days rely on a boring, uninspired web interface, Daylite has native apps for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, taking full advantage of all the Apple APIs. At the same time, Daylite uses the latest cloud syncing technology to give you your data wherever you need it. It’s like combining peanut butter with chocolate.

Of course Daylite already has support for Apple's Focus Mode, including setting up Daylite notifications as time-sensitive. You can learn more about Daylite and Focus Mode right here. There is no reason your CRM shouldn’t give you that native app feel and feature list. Just head over to Daylite and check it out.

TextExpander (Sponsor)

My thanks to this week’s MacSparky sponsor, TextExpander. TextExpander works for you to take your time back by helping you work faster and smarter so you can focus your time on your most important work by instantly inserting your text snippets with just a few keystrokes. 

Think of all of the different kinds of links you share everyday with your friends, colleagues, or customers. You can turn all of these must-see links into TextExpander snippets in a way that won’t look like alphabet soup, but that will also save you time. Once you create a new Snippet Group for things you frequently link to, like “My GIFs” or “Work Links” or “Affiliate Sites”, you would just have to type the abbreviation you created for your link snippet, instead of copying and pasting an entire address. For example, you could set up a snippet “/twitter” or “/instagram” which will pop up your account URLs so you can share links to your social media accounts. Or a link snippet could save you time if you have to go to a recurring video conference room. If you’ve created a link snippet for this virtual meeting room, you don’t have to go searching for that URL or email that has it for you to join that meeting. Think of all the link snippets you could create. 

Just a couple of keystrokes can instantly expand your snippets with TextExpander. It’s an instant productivity booster. You can leave the boring, repetitive tasks in the past when you get TextExpander and focus on what matters most.

Daylite Is Monterey ready! (Sponsor)

Excited about the macOS Monterey? So are we! Daylite is an award-winning CRM and productivity app made exclusively for your Mac, and it's now Monterey ready! Daylite empowers small businesses by improving team efficiency and making collaboration easy—everything is organized, searchable, and accessible, with or without an internet connection. Daylite is the only Mac-focused CRM app that seamlessly integrates with Apple devices and most of the built-in Apple apps and features, like direct Apple Mail integration, so you and your team can capture all email communication in one place. That means you can create opportunities, appointments and tasks in Daylite right from your Apple Mail.

Daylite’s productivity-focused design helps you and your team get more done throughout the full customer lifecycle. From meeting prospects and winning business to managing the moving pieces on projects, all the way through to following up for referrals and repeat business, it’s all done in Daylite.

If you live by the Mac, you’ll love Daylite. Start your free 30-day Daylite trial today!

Fix Your Email. Use SaneBox (Sponsor)

SaneBox is this week's MacSparky sponsor. There's a lot of email going around, and SaneBox and its A.I. helps me keep focused on actionable emails and takes the work of filtering what does not need to be read right now.

One of the ways SaneBox does this is with the @SaneCC. It's a filtering folder. What goes in there? It's the emails I'm CC’ed on. It just makes sense to me. When I'm not on the "To:" line, that means the email isn't necessarily an actionable item, more like I'm included on the information, a sort of FYI. So do I have to read it RIGHT NOW? No, and that's the beauty of SaneBox. Once I've trained @SaneCC, I can go to this folder and read these emails later when I have the time to read them.

But SaneBox doesn't just work for me, it works with me. If there's an email from someone who is Inbox-worthy, I can train SaneBox to put the email from them into my Inbox, even though I'm CC'ed because I can control @SaneCC from my Trainings list. Once a sender is trained, SaneBox knows to let this sender gets to pass through the velvet rope into my Inbox.

If you're curious how to get SaneBox identify your important messages, hide distractions, banish annoying senders, remind you to follow up and more, now is the time to try it out. You can sign up for a free trial and get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription.

The Imminent TextExpander 7 (Sponsor)

I’m excited that this week’s sponsor, TextExpander, is about to release version 7. I’ve written and talked a lot about TextExpander. It instantly insert snippets of text that you’ve saved as abbreviations in order to streamline and speed up everything you type. What’s new with the upcoming 7.0 version is that it:

• Updates and unifies the user experience

• Improves main window search

• Improves performance and responsiveness

• Improves conflict management

• Broadens accessibility

• Has other fixes and improvements.

TextExpander 7 is expected soon and is already in the app’s beta channel. If you’re currently a user, you can check "include beta builds" in TextExpander's Update preference tab to be prompted to update to the public beta. This is going to be a popular update.

SaneBox (Sponsor)

My thanks to this week’s sponsor at MacSparky, SaneBox. SaneBox is just one of my secret weapons that gets me to Inbox Zero. Not all emails are urgent, and there are others that I do need to act on, but not until later. For these kinds of items, I am thankful for SaneBox’s SaneSnooze folders. SaneSnooze folders allow you to defer email until a future time. An email message I don’t have to deal with right now isn’t left as an unread distraction email in my Inbox. Instead, with SaneSnooze I can move the email out of my Inbox and schedule it to appear when I want to deal with it. For instance, I can move tomorrow’s meeting agenda to my SaneSnooze folder @SaneTomorrow so I can look at it on the day of the meeting. I can move a bill pay reminder to my SaneSnooze folder @Snooze30th so I can remember to pay my bills that are due at the end of the month.  

SaneBox helps us try to stay sane and snoozing emails until they are actionable keeps me focused and productive, not to mention how this helps declutter my Inbox. This is just one SaneBox’s helpful tools and they’re offering friends of MacSparky a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription, so you can try it out for yourself.

Add TextExpander toYour Team (Sponsor)

My thanks to this week’s sponsor, TextExpander. TextExpander allows me and my team to work faster and smarter. I’ve got a team of people I work with and one of those people is an assistant. By using TextExpander, we can use shared snippets to keep us on message. I can manage and share snippets so she can easily and accurately answer some of the more common questions with just a few keystrokes. And I can style our snippet text and add images and links, which she can then easily personalize and edit when and how she needs to.

TextExpander gives us the ability to streamline and speed up what we type, which makes it easier for a productive Team MacSparky to to get our work done. Redeem an offer from TextExpander for 20% off and try for yourself how you and your team can say more with less work.

TextExpander — Fuhgeddaboudit (Sponsor)

This week’s sponsor at MacSparky is TextExpander. With TextExpander, you create snippets, whether it’s a word, a phrase, a sentence or longer. Once you save that snippet with a short abbreviation, you can, with few keystrokes rather than typing your snippet out, quickly insert the text you want anywhere you type. 

There are some words and phrases that I can’t get my fingers to type correctly, or I don’t remember the correct spelling or where the accent mark goes. With TextExpander at my fingertips, I never have to worry about this. For instance, I like saying, “Forget about it,” but what I really mean is, “Fuhgeddaboudit!” I cannot remember how to spell that. I use four keystrokes and TextExpender pops in the 14-letter word. I’m lucky that MacSparky’s worldwide, and sometimes, I like to say thanks back in another language. There’s a Thanks group in my TextExpander library so I never have to look that up since I just keep (and update) TextExpander snippets on how to say, “Thank you.” 감사합니다, TextExpander.

TextExpander helps you work faster and smarter so you can focus your time on your most important work. Get 20% off TextExpander and get ready to minimize effort and maximize productivity.

Daylite pushes your productivity and profits to the Macs (Sponsor)

Make no mistake, Daylite isn’t just a CRM tool, it’s a Mac CRM tool. It isn’t for everyone, it’s for us. It’s for Mac people. People who ‘get’ that thinking exclusively and holistically about small business is actually thinking big. 

Just like a Mac, Daylite is an intuitive way of instantly integrating your Apple calendar and Apple mail, reminders, notes, tasks and more. Online, offline, wherever, it’s completely shareable with any Mac user and accessible from any macOS or iOS device. Daylite allows you to minimize the juggling of accounts, tasks and projects while maximizing leads, customer relationships and profits.

At once, your small business has everything you and your team expect from a leading CRM tool while having the stress-relieving perks you’d only expect from a made-for-Mac app. Name one other CRM app with the productivity-boosting power to seamlessly work well with Apple integration. 

It’s Daylite. Learn more. 

SaneBox: To Unsubscribe without Unsubscribing (Sponsor)

Have you ever want to banish someone into a black hole? You can with SaneBox, this week’s MacSparky sponsor. If you don’t want to hear from a sender again, or want to unsubscribe from a list without having to unsubscribe from a list, SaneBox will do the dirty work for you. 

The SaneBlackHole is the folder for training emails to your trash. You’ll move messages into this folder, and SaneBox will learn that all future emails from these senders go to the trash. 

Sometimes, unsubscribing from an email list can do more harm than good. Depending on the list you’re trying to remove yourself from, because you’ve identified yourself as a real person by unsubscribing, you may have opened yourself up to even more junk mail coming your way. Anything that comes from these senders in the future will be put directly into the SaneBlackHole, so you don’t even have to bother with unsubscribing.

Banish your email to the SaneBlackHole. And if you do make a mistake, you can just move the email out of your SaneBlackHole folder to the correct Sane folder. If you’re thinking about giving SaneBox a try, now’s a great time. You can sign up for your free trial, and you'll get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription.

TextExpander: Type Less, Say More (Sponsor)

I’d like to thank TextExpander for sponsoring the site this week. TextExpander allows you to be more efficient and productive by taking the task of repetitive typing out of your hands. With TextExpander, you can use a keyboard shortcut or abbreviation to insert a snippet. Are you still hunting and searching and copying and pasting that thing you once typed out in email you once sent that would be a perfect reply to the email you’re currently composing? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Once you come up with your perfect response, be it a phrase, a sentence, or a paragraph, you’ve already created your snippet. Just save it in TextExpander, and then the next time you want to use it, type the shortcut or abbreviation, and see the snippet you created automatically expand your text. Do less repetitive typing and tasks by letting TextExpander do the work for you. TextExpander wants you to work smarter, not harder, and they’re offering MacSparky readers 20% off, so try for yourself today. 

Work Faster on Your Mac with Better Touch Tool (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by one of my favorite Mac utilities, BetterTouchTool. Apple’s built-in gestures for its mice and trackpads are great, but they don’t go far enough. With BetterTouchTool, you can add an entire suite of gestures to your mouse and trackpad for just the apps and actions that you need.

Do you want to move between tabs in Safari by swiping or tapping your trackpad? BetterTouchTool does that. want to put your Mac to sleep with a custom trackpad gesture? BetterTouchTool does that to. BetterTouchTool lets you hot-wire your trackpad and mouse. BetterTouchTool additionally contains some handy features like window snapping, a clipboard manager, a screenshot editor, and much more. This app is an absolute game-changer. Also, you can now join the BetterTouchTool Community at community.folivora.ai to learn how to get even more from BetterTouchTool. Users have shared some amazing presets there, including some very advanced custom Touch Bar setups that you should check out.

BetterTouchTool comes with a 45-day trial after which you can choose between a license that includes all updates for two years and a lifetime license. BetterTouchTool has been around for ten years, and I've been using it the entire time. With BetterTouchTool, I can make my Mac dance. You should too. MacSparky readers can purchase BetterTouchTool for 15% off at checkout by using the coupon code MACSPARKYBTT for a limited time. So don’t delay. Go to folivora.ai to learn more and take advantage of the special limited-time, 15% discount on BetterTouchTool.

Daylite: A Mac-to-Mac CRM Solution (Sponsor)

If you’re a smallish business (up to 100 people), operating in a macOS or iOS environment, there’s a less-clunky, native Mac option that will certainly "check" all the usual CRM boxes while providing those uniquely intuitive and stress-relieving features that have become the exclusive domain of the Apple community. 

It’s Daylite.

From identifying that first seed of a lead to landing the business and the repeat business, Daylite stays with you and your team for the entire customer lifecycle. And all the resources are at your fingertips, online or offline on a Mac, iPhone or iPad.

In a Mac-inspired way, Daylite expands the definition of CRM and boosts your team’s productivity while reducing the steps and time spent searching, merging and typing. As a bonus, you can integrate Apple calendars, Apple Mail and Reminders, Siri and more. Online or offline, on any Mac device, to and from any Mac user, Daylite is the Mac-minded way of keeping your business, your team and yourself moving forward — fast-forward. Check it out here.

SaneBox (Sponsor)

We live in the 21st century. There are some really great tools at our disposal, so let’s use them. I put SaneBox’s robots in that category. SaneBox is this week’s MacSparky sponsor, and their email robots will filter unimportant email out of your Inbox, so you won’t be distracted by emails you don’t need to read right now.

SaneBox's powerful AI will “talk” to your email server. When it sees an email that is not Inbox-worthy, it will instruct it to process all of those unimportant emails and put them into SaneLater (or other Sane folders you activate) so that you can speed up review by subject content and either archive or delete them later at your convenience. Your data stays private. The robots don’t look at the content of your emails (except when you choose optional features like Sane Attachments). Instead, the SaneBox robots analyze your past interactions with your email to figure out what is important to you.

Let the robots do the work for you. Try SaneBox now, which is offering a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription. Don’t let unimportant emails take one more minute of your valuable time and start using SaneBox, which lets you focus on what matters most. 

TextExpander (Sponsor)

TextExpander, MacSparky’s sponsor this week, helps you work faster and smarter so you can focus your time on your most important work. If there’s a thing you type more than a few times, it probably needs TextExpander. When using TextExpander, you can instantly insert snippets of text as you type by using a quick search or an abbreviation instead of typing out whole lines, sentences, or forms. Use these abbreviations to streamline and speed up everything you type with just a few keystrokes. You’ll be typing less and saying more.

Let’s say you crafted a response in an email you sent and you want to use it again to reply to another email. You know it’s somewhere, and you just have to find it. Instead of taking to the time to hunt for that email, and then copying and pasting that line, sentence, or paragraph you searched for, you can save that as a snippet so it’s ready at your fingertips for all the times you want to use it. Working faster and smarter sounds pretty cool, right? If you want to give TextExpander a try, now is the time. Click here and get 20% off.

TextExpander — Say More with Less Work (Sponsor)

I’m always looking for things to help me save time, which is one of the reasons I dig TextExpander, MacSparky’s sponsor this week. TextExpander puts time-saving power at your fingertips. You set up a shortcut once, and then future you thanks you for having less work to do and saving some time. Instead of re-typing the same thing over and over again or copying and pasting a message or reply, use a few keystrokes with TextExpander and see TextExpander expand your snippets. For instance, if I type, “xdts” (four tippety-types), TextExpander will put a date and time string that looks like this: 2021-07-08 09:10. Dashes and colon and 16 tippet-types !?! Time saved. I didn’t have to stop and look at a calendar or clock for reference. I just hit a few keys, and, whoomp, there it is.

And you can do this anywhere you type because you can get your snippets on all your devices. Convenient, accurate, and consistent. TextExpander helps you communicate easier, and you get to focus on what matters most. If you’re even TextExpander-curious, now is the time to try it because they’re offering 20% off your first year.

SaneBox (Sponsor)

If you’re looking to boost your email productivity, give SaneBox a try. SaneBox is MacSparky’s sponsor this week, and the robot your email needs. They use algorithms based on your interactions such as which emails you open, which ones you respond to, how quickly, how often, etc. The robots figure out what’s important to you. It moves unimportant emails out of your inbox into a separate folder called SaneLater and summarizes them in a digest that allows you to breeze through those emails. Check out how that works below.

SaneBox is smart and convenient, working on any device or client. Stop spending your time processing email and let the robots at SaneBox do that for you. You can sign up for your free trial and get a $10 credit to use towards a subscription.