In this microlearning tutorial, Randall F. Dean demonstrates a productivity workflow that uses self‑sent emails as a rapid capture method for tasks, calendar events, and contacts while on the go. He shows how to compose brief emails on a smartphone—using the subject line to describe the action (e.g., “Contact electrician about outside lights”, “Doctor appointment Tuesday at 9:00 AM”, “Add John Doe to contacts”)—and send them to both his Outlook and Gmail accounts. Once back at his computer, he drags each email into the appropriate Outlook pane (Tasks, Calendar, People) to automatically create a task, an appointment, or a contact, editing any voice‑to‑text errors as needed. He repeats the process in Gmail, using the Gmail Tasks, Calendar, and Contacts interfaces to create the same items, including copying email body content into a new contact. Dean compares this email‑capture method to using native mobile apps (Outlook, Microsoft To‑Do, Google Workspace apps), arguing that sending an email can be faster because it avoids opening multiple apps on the phone. He concludes with a reminder to capture thoughts immediately, regardless of the tool used, and provides a call‑to‑action for further resources.
Chapters
All right. Hi everybody. Randall F. Dean, the Email Sanity Expert here again. I want to do a little microlearning tip for both my Outlook and my Gmail users today, sharing something I've been doing for years and years. And I'm wondering if people have even considered doing this. You'll see, I'm asking, have you ever considered sending yourself emails? Which maybe you think sounds a little bit crazy, But let me explain the situation. You're out and about, and on the fly you think of something you either need to remember to do or something you need to schedule. Okay, and so to give you this, I'm actually going to send these to me on my smartphone, and I'm going to send them to both of my email accounts, my Outlook and my Gmail account. So let's set this thing up. First email, there's my Gmail and there's my Outlook. Notice that they've been, you know, automatically, what would you say, inserted because I send these emails all the time. And here's the subject line of the first email. Contact electrician about outside lights. Send. There's one email sent. Now I'm going to do email number 2. Once again, to both my Gmail and my Outlook. Doctor appointment Tuesday at 9:00 AM. And I'm going to do email number 3. Once again, to my Gmail and my Outlook. This one, I'm going to add a little bit more. Add John Doe to contacts. Now that's in the subject line. All the three of these have been in the subject line, but I'm going to go down into the body of this now. And I'm going to add in a little bit more text right here. Email John@john doe.com. Mobile 1234567890. I'm gonna hit send on this one. Okay, so I just sent 3 emails. Okay. Now, here is why I did it. I'm gonna go in Now, remember I was out and about. I did those on the fly because I thought of them when they came up. Let's go into my Outlook now. Look at this. Boom, boom, and boom. Now, if you've looked at my other videos and you want to see this much more in depth, you can see this much more in depth in a minute. But remember, contact electrician about outside lights. Drag it, drop it down to task Outlook user. And now I've made a new task contact. And notice that when I did the subject line, I actually said exactly what it is I need to do. So I'm just going to move this to Monday and category household. Save and close. That fast, I just made that task. Now, doctor appointment Tuesday at 2. Let me click on this one, drag it down here to calendar, drop it, which makes a new calendar appointment. And I can actually schedule this for my doctor appointment Tuesday at 9. Save and close. And wait a minute, let's add John Doe to contacts. Now this one did a little something funny because of the voice-to-text, you'll see in a second. I'm going to grab this one, drag it down here to people. Now what it did is actually it put in my name and information, but what I can do really quickly here is just come down here and grab John Doe, Ctrl+C, replace the name, Ctrl+V. Let's grab that email address. Now notice it typed it a little bit funny, so I might want to edit this. Ctrl+C. They didn't spell John Doe right, but you know, just for academic purposes, we'll put that in just the way it is. And notice they did something funny with the mobile number because of voice-to-text, but I can just type it in. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. Save and close. I just added All 3 tasks that quickly. Well, task, calendar item, contact. I did all 3 things that quickly in Outlook. Wait, we got some Gmail people out here. Let's go out here to my Gmail. Boom, boom. Where's number 3? I don't see John Doe, but we'll, we'll show you how that one works too. I'm surprised that didn't come in. Let's come in here. Oh, there it is. There's John Doe. Now, Notice that I can click on Tasks over here, Gmail People, and once the Tasks fully loads, I can take this one, Contact electrician about outside lights, drag it over here, and then I can add a date and time of tomorrow and hit OK. Boom! That fast, that fast I made the task. Wait a minute, doctor appointment Tuesday at 2. This one, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to open it, come up to the three dots at the top, the ellipses, Click on that, hit Create Event. And just like I showed you in Outlook, let's set the date for Tuesday and the time for 9:00 AM. Save. Would you like to send invitation? No, don't send. But that quick. Now it's on here. Okay. And now, Number 3, let's go back to my email. I got John Doe. Now watch what I can do here. This one's actually sort of a little bit unique. I can actually come in and, uh, basically go to my contacts right here. But first, what I want to do is open this email and I want to grab that info that I sent myself. Ctrl+C. Now I'm going to go to contacts over here to the side. And I do this by using the pop widget at the top to open it into a full page panel and hitting Create Contact. Now, when I hit Create Contact, because I did that copy and paste, let's come in here real quick and page down to the bottom where you have notes. I'm going to do a Ctrl+V. Now, by doing this, I can take all of that info and drop it all in here at once. But of course, now I can come up here and I can just quickly create this contact. And then I can come down here to the notes, grab that email address, Ctrl+C, come up here to email, Ctrl+V. And here I can actually do that quick edit I was showing you earlier. And then because it brought in the mobile in this way, notice that you can actually come in here and you can type in the address For phone, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0. And notice what it did. It actually tried to do this. So let's add a 1 at the beginning of that. There we go. And label mobile and then hit save. That easy. Now, of course, I'm connected to John LinkedIn or Facebook or something, I can actually go and snip a picture and drop it in right here so I can see the picture when I bring up the contact to remember who this person is. The reason I'm doing this now, I got to make a little disclaimer here. Okay, here's my disclaimer. Um, there's the other option, which is if you're fully tricked out on your device with either the Outlook app and/or Microsoft To Do, or you've got your Google Workspace set up with the Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Tasks, and Google Contacts app, you can do all of this on the fly right in those apps. But in order to do that, of course, you have to open up Google Tasks and set up the whole task. And I'm just going to ask the question, is it faster to just make that email and hit send so that you can do the actual creation of the task utilizing the drag and drop and/or creation utilities inside of your Gmail to make task, calendar, and contact items when you get back to your regular office? I, I'm just going to say maybe sending the email to yourself is a little bit quicker. You can do it both ways. I don't care which way you do it, just don't lose the thought. Grab the thought when it happens, get it into your device, and that way you can have it for later so you don't forget. And you can catch them right when they're on the fly. All right, I hope this gives you some ideas, a couple ways you can play around with this. All right. If you like this video, first I'd like to say thank you for your time. If you like the video, please consider giving it a like, maybe write a comment if you're doing something else here, and consider subscribing to the channel. Want to learn more about me? Go check out my website, randalldean.com. And if you'd like to get a whole series of bonus PDF tip sheets with tips on time management, email management, Outlook, Gmail 365, Google Workspace, smartphone, tablet usage, send me an email, randy@randalldean.com. And put YouTube PDF in the subject line. Thanks, everybody.
