Ep. 130: Let Your OFS Manage Your Email With Gmail Delegation

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 130, letting your OFS manage your email using Gmail delegation. This is. It's been a long time since I did this, but one day I was going through my email and I was just, like, frustrated with the amount of garbage that shows up in my inbox as I was doing it. I thought, this is stupid. Why am I doing this? I. I have. I have this va, which is what I considered him at the time. I have this VA that I bet he could spend an extra 10 minutes a day and just make my life easier. And maybe it saves me 10 minutes a day, which is so sweet, right? So I started teaching him how to manage some of my email and not. Not respond to any of my email. And even I was, like, very conservative with it. I just wanted him to get rid of the spam and things that I. That. That I knew that I could teach him that I didn't want in my inbox every day. And so some of that was like, unsubscribing from things or just archiving things. And so we started working through it, and it took a little bit of time where. Like, it took some extra time for me where every day I would have to go in and look at my inbox, then I would go look at my archive box and make sure things weren't archived that I didn't want archived. And I look at my spam and I would. I was just careful with it, right? Because, you know, it's personal information. But he got really good at it. And then this evolved over time to having someone else also do this with me. And then I started having her, like, do more. She started writing responses for me. She started. So she never actually sends responses to people, Actually, occasionally she will, but usually she will create a draft in my inbox. She creates a draft to that person, and then that draft is there. When I get to that email, I just see, oh, there's already an email response written to this, which is really helpful because she'll go and find answers to people's questions from things that we've previously. Where we've previously answered it. And she'll add the link into the email, and I just have to go in and click send, which is really, really nice. Waking up with an inbox free of spam and clean and having help is such a big deal. And it's more than just like, my inbox is clean. It's I accomplished something really awesome with this. I taught someone else how to do this, and it is making my life more effective and easier every single day. And that by itself is. It's a cool feeling to have accomplished something like this. So here's a new way that my ofs, I had no idea. I don't use Gmail, but my OFS pointed this out to me, that she knows other people that are doing this, and she went and researched exactly how this works. So Google now, if you use Workspace, Google Workspace or Gmail, you can now turn on Gmail delegation. Gmail. I'm just looking at the screenshot that she sent me. Gmail delegation lets you delegate users so that, like, your ofs to access your email without them having your email account. So without them having your email password. Now, why would you want this? Well, if you're using your email address and password to log into other sites, you don't necessarily want your ofs to have that email password combination. It can be really nice to have them access your email without having your email and password. They. They can get in, they can respond, they can archive, they can delete, they can send emails. You just probably want to give them instructions. Just so you know, any email that is sent on your behalf by them, when it shows up to someone else's inbox, it'll have your name on it and then it'll have sent their name. So. And you can't remove that piece of it that's automatically there. So that may be good, it may be bad. People that are receiving it might say nothing. Some people might be like, because I've had this experience, hey, that's super awesome that you have someone in the Philippines responding for you. I love it. Congratulations on outsourcing your work. You'd be surprised at, like, people's reaction to this, how often you think, oh, it's all gonna be negative. And then, oh, no, you get quite a bit of positive reaction to it. So just a tip that might make might give you a little bit more comfort in an outsourcing email that's always and everywhere and always on, and it's just really nice to get help with it.