Can’t turn the sound up? Here’s the transcript: 

Hey friends, it’s Nicole from the Resilient VA, and today we’re chatting about boundaries, email, and my favorite Gmail inbox tool.

One of the things that I feel so strongly about as a virtual assistant is the power of setting boundaries. Every virtual assistant I know has a different way of doing this, but for me it works really well to set office hours for my clients. My clients know that from Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00, if they email me, call me, text me, Slack me, (or however they choose to get in touch with me) I will get back to them within two hours. This is true whether I’m sitting at my desk, if I’m sitting in a doctor’s appointment, if I am out running errands. No matter what is going on in my day, from 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday my clients know that I am in contact, unless I tell them differently.

This does not mean that I’m working from 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday, because if you are balancing a chronic illness, if you’re caring for a loved one, if you have anything going on in your life really (and many people who are working from home do) you might be working on a Saturday afternoon or you might be working at 9:00 in the evening because that’s when the kids are asleep.

But if you email a client at 9:00 on a Monday night, they are going to start emailing you at 9:00 on Monday night and wanting you to get back to them right away. That can be maddening.

But it’s really easy to start dropping the ball on things if you’re working at 9:00 in the night but you don’t want to send the email then so you’re like, “Well I’ll just save it in the drafts folder of my Gmail and I’ll get back to it at 9:00 AM tomorrow when I come and I sit down at my desk.” If you’re anything like me, if you don’t do it in the moment, it’s probably not going to happen. Then your client is going to say, “I didn’t get this deliverable, what’s going on?” and you say, “But I think I sent it,” and the whole time it’s sitting in your drafts folder, right?

There’s an amazing tool that I want to share with you today that is going to solve that problem for you, and it’s going to do it for free. Boomerang is an add-on to your Gmail. It works with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, pretty much any browser that you’re using. It works with free Gmail accounts and it also works with G Suite accounts. What it does is it allows you to send an email later. So if you’re writing an email on Saturday afternoon and you want to send it Monday morning, you literally just schedule it and it will go out like clockwork on Monday morning.

I know that if you’re anything like me you need to see things in action, so I wanted to take you into my inbox and show you what Boomerang looks like in action. In order to use the scheduling feature, literally all you do is come up here and compose an email like you normally would do. Tell it who you’re sending it to, get your subject, fill in all of the amazing things you want to send to your client. Instead of hitting the blue send button, you come down here and you hit the red button and it literally allows you to choose when you want to send it to a client. This could be in an hour, it could be in five minutes even. You can send it a week from today, two weeks from today, six months from today. You get to tell it when you want it to send. If you know that you’re going to have recurring messages or you want to remind clients of a task that needs to be done every Tuesday, you can also schedule recurring messages as well.

You also have the option of Boomeranging your message or having it pop up in your inbox just like it was new mail. You can set it for whatever time you want. If you want to follow up tomorrow morning if you haven’t heard from your client, if you want to follow up in a week if you haven’t heard from your client, you can set the time right there. You really have the ability to automate your brain basically, reminding yourself to follow up and what needs to be done. If you’re balancing a lot of different things, this can be amazing.

One of the most important things you can do as a virtual assistant is to maintain open lines of communication with your clients. I love Boomerang because it helps me do that more efficiently, in a way that works for my schedule and for theirs!