The tech stack I use to keep track of my promises
“When you make a promise you give hope, when you follow through you build trust.”
That was the quote from the speed of trust that nailed it for me, I was sick of asking for “forgiveness” when my inbox was so full that I couldn’t see an email in my inbox anymore.
It wasn’t an email problem, it was a me problem. I’ve always had this problem. I try to help as many people as I can, which is a good thing, but without a system to make sure I follow through, I’m actually just disappointing too many people.
Trust can be diminished in an instant, after years of building it up, it is fragile.
Too many of us say: “If I just had an AI meeting tool to keep track of all my to-do’s” but that isn’t really a solve for missing to-do’s and deadlines.
Your comfort or discomfort with blowing a deadline, or missing an email that isn’t about tech, that is about you.
I have tried 10+ different systems to be better at managing promises / deadlines. The thing that finally landed me on a good system, was that I felt missed deadlines were broken promises and unforced withdrawals from the “trust bank” with people, so I had no choice but to keep working at it.
I had tablets (for email only), meeting schedulers, AI tools, EA’s, Zapiers, Makes, to-do lists, google tasks, reminders, inbox pause tools, folder systems, you name it I tried it.
Thankfully today I have a system that helps me be stronger than ever, but it was the desire to get better that made me better, the desire to avoid disappointing people once again and once again.
Is the “trust loss” of a broken promise worth setting up the Free system.
- Clockify — FREE
- Email Folders — FREE
- Followupthen -FREE (up to 50) — $4/mo
- Slack + Zapier — FREE (until you get to too many zaps /month)
- Inbox pause — FREE
- Exec Assistant — NOT FREE :)
Pause Inbox
I work out of my inbox, so I must stop the flow of what comes in (I use inbox pause for that). I peek into my paused inbox every once in a while throughout the day but you can set up all kinds of rules to make sure the right things get through.
Clockify
I track my time sorting email, differently than answering email
I do subscribe to the OHIO method to best I can, only hit it once. I try to file it or answer it.
I also found in my weekly hours reviews that I had these big blocks of “email” that is where folders came into play.
Email Folders
For good or bad I work linearly, so I must put my folders in number order so my folder names sound like:
1 — Sales
1 — Client Work
2 — Innnovation
2 — Sales
3–HR
Putting them in number order means when I go to work linearly, there is no confusion about what I should do… work the 1’s until they are empty. By having a folder system I can change my hours from marketing, to sales, to innovation, to charity in my time tracker, which helps me do analyses like this with more precision.
Slack + Zapier
We use slack a lot here, and that can get messy in keeping track of promises so I set up a Zapier that if I hit “save” it automatically pushes into my inbox, where I have a system, as you are reading, to keep track of my promises. Slack is very hard for me to manage all the promises in, so that is one key thing…get all the promises in ONE place.
Followupthen
Ever have an email staring at you, taking up space in yoiur inbox and pushing other emails to “page 2” — I’m telling you, page 2 is where promises go to be forgotten!
Folowupthen is so much better than Google’s reminders and it crushes on mobile in your regular gmail app, just add the FUTs to your address book, it is so much faster. Every Jan1, every email receipt for donations come back into my inbox for instance.
Repeat followupthen’s are my jam: every20hours@, every3weeks@ or everyfriday8a@ or every february@ they allow you delete something you just can’t get to, knowing it won’t be forgotten because it is coming back in. For some reason my brain works better if I let that happen vs filing them away all the time.
The autocomplete is so helpful!!
Executive Assistant
My EA has to have full access to my inbox, that allows her to go into my folders and align us on our daily standups… She’ll say things like
“Wil, this email has been sitting in 1 — Client work for 2 days, yet I saw you clock 2 hours on team shout outs, I need you to refocus, move it to another priority, etc etc.”
Now, not everyone can have an accountability partner like that, but you can use AI to do some of it, espcialy with tools like Open AI’s Operator. You could technically try having it look at your hours in clockify or use zapier to dump your hours somewhere and then you could use operator to go into your inbox and look for certain folders (I would recommend you give it the exact URL to each of your high priority folders).
