Did you know dolphins have the best memory in the animal kingdom? You might’ve thought it was elephants. 

Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah. Everyone has that team member who remembers everything. It might be you. Or maybe your brain refreshes every 48 hours. That’s okay—we weren’t built like dolphins, but we still have to stay on top of meetings, deadlines, and other tasks. 

All the calendars and to-do lists in the world can’t save us from ourselves, though they certainly try. And though app reminders keep you and your team on top of the important stuff, they often rely on humans to set them first. Who has time to check all the alert options for a task or calendar event? 

We may never be as cool as dolphins, but with automation, you can automatically send or receive reminders of your most pressing tasks wherever you need them.  

Easily create automatic workflows that send reminders for you

With Zapier, you can automate recurring tasks—giving you back valuable time to focus on higher priority items. The workflows you build in Zapier—we call them Zaps—can automate many common tasks, such as sending out a weekly reminder email to your team.

A Zap always consists of two parts: 

1. The trigger, which is an event that starts a Zap. For example, every weekday at 3 p.m. (Think of this as the when.)

2. The action, which is an event a Zap performs after it’s triggered. For example, send an email. (This is the do.)

To help you get started, we rounded up a few of the most used Zaps that automatically send reminder messages on a recurring schedule. Just click on the button below to get started. 

Send weekly reminders

Send daily reminders

Send monthly reminders

Build your own Zap

If you need a more complex reminder system because you’re a complex human being, you can create your own Zap instead. This is also the best way to start if you’d like your Zap to perform more than one action, like send yourself a reminder message in Slack and adding a task to your to-do list. 

Here’s how to do it: 

1. Create a new Zap in your Zapier account.

2. Select Schedule by Zapier as your trigger app and choose the frequency you’d like your message to trigger, such as daily or weekly. (If you need reminders on a more nuanced schedule, we’d recommend setting up a Zap based on events in your calendar instead.)

3. Select your email, team chat, or task app, then choose the action event that will send your message. (For example, you might select “send channel message” for team reminders or “send direct message” for personal alerts.)

4. Next, finish filling out the message details. You can add links and format your text however you’d like. (If you’d like to add more actions, click the plus sign (+) and repeat steps 3-4 as needed.) 

5. Test your Zap, and if all looks good, it’s ready to use!

Use automation as a second brain

With thousands of integrations, you can use Zapier to automate most (if not all) of your tedious tasks—gaining back valuable time. By automating reminders to yourself or your team, you can save your precious brainpower for the tasks that need your undivided attention. You may not be a dolphin, but you can at least enjoy the freedom like one. 

Take our quiz and automate something new

This article was originally published in September 2021. It was most recently updated in March 2024.

Feathery is a nifty tool that uses AI to help you build high-quality forms in minutes. With it, you can collaborate on forms, build approval flows for product teams, and easily connect signatures from clients.  

While it’s an accessible, user-friendly way to get info from leads (and customers!), you don’t want their responses to get caught in a bottleneck. 

Automation can help bridge that gap. With Zapier, you can connect Feathery to your business-critical apps and get that information where it needs to go—automatically. Here are the best ways to automate Feathery, from subscribing leads to your newsletter to sending them straight to your CRM. 

Table of contents

Send lead information to your ads tools

Do you use forms to capture leads? Whether you embed them on your website or in your email, forms are a great way to capture prospects from any stage of the sales funnel. 

But when they do fill out a form, you want to add them to your ad campaigns (think Facebook or Google Ads) straight away—while they’re still warm. Plus, if a lead fails to convert, adding them to a retargeting campaign can get them back on board.

But doing so manually isn’t exactly conducive to efficiency. Instead, you can use these Zaps to send lead data straight to specific audiences in your favorite ad tools. 

Subscribe contacts to your newsletter

Ad campaigns aren’t your only means of nurturing leads. Sending your target audience regular newsletters helps you increase your customer base by reaching a wide group of people, including the folks who haven’t converted yet. 

Adding automation into the mix can be a real game changer here. These Zaps pull the lead information from your forms—and auto-populates it into your email newsletter tools in real time. That way, you can start nurturing (or recapturing interest!) right away. 

Add incoming leads to your CRM

Oftentimes, a CRM is your business’s single source of truth when it comes to prospects. And not just for logging your lead’s contact information but also for each engagement your sales team has with leads—including the reason your prospects have for reaching out to you via a form. 

With these workflows, Zapier will send that form context straight to your CRM directly from Feathery (including any Notes fields they’ve filled out). This ensures your sales team has all the most up-to-date context around a specific deal or lead and can take the appropriate action from there. 

Create tickets from support forms

Customer support teams have a lot on their plate. That’s why most businesses ask customers to first fill out forms if they’re experiencing an issue with their product or service. 

That way, they can review the issue, carry out any initial troubleshooting, or route the problem to the right product team before they reach back out. 

This is where automation can once again save the day (or at least keep your customer happy). These Zaps will automatically create tickets in your customer support tools (think Jira or Zendesk) based on the information your customers submit. 

You could even add an AI step to add extra context to each ticket in the form of acceptance criteria. You could add extra requirements, clear instructions, and anything else you think your support teams should know. 

Track and log form submissions 

Need a way to track each and every form submission you receive from clients? Whether you want to keep a running log for other teams to access or a private record of all your form submissions, these workflows have got you covered. 

You can automatically send new forms straight to a spreadsheet or your Google Drive, without having to resort to manually copying and pasting. 

Take your forms to the next level with Feathery and Zapier

No matter how you use Feathery to build forms—from capturing leads to solving product issues—these processes have many moving parts. 

But with a few automatic workflows, you can easily streamline your workflows from start to finish. Whether you need to automatically log forms in a single database or subscribe new leads to your newsletter, Zapier can make it a breeze. 

And this is just the start of what you can do with Feathery and Zapier. What will you automate first?

I would be completely lost without my calendar, and I bet the same is true for you. That’s why I don’t want to leave my calendar in some browser tab, alongside the hundreds of other things I happen to be researching at the time. This is where dedicated calendar software comes in.

There are so many great Mac calendar apps, to the point where a Windows user might feel left out. You shouldn’t, though, because Windows comes with a pretty great calendar app out of the box, and there are a few solid ones to check out beyond that. Here’s how to find them.

The best Windows calendar apps

What makes the best calendar app for Windows?

Anyone can access Google Calendar from a browser; desktop apps are for someone who wants more than that. I write about productivity professionally and have been using desktop calendar apps for decades. In my experience, the best Windows calendar apps do all the following things:

• Offer a native Windows interface. Sticking a web app in a desktop window isn’t good enough—the best Windows calendar apps feel like they belong in Windows and offer native features like keyboard shortcuts.

• Show you your schedule at a glance. You should be able to open your calendar and see what needs doing, whatever that means to you. For some, this will mean a week view; for others, it’s an agenda of the day’s appointments—the best apps offer flexibility.

• Make it easy to add appointments. Adding appointments should be as quick and as simple as possible. Ideally this should be possible using only keyboard shortcuts.

• Notify you of upcoming appointments. There should be optional notifications when an event is about to start.

• Sync with multiple platforms. It’s not enough for your calendar to only work locally: at the very least, it needs to sync with your phone. Ideally, there should also be a way to sync with Google, Apple, and Microsoft accounts, along with advanced options for CalDAV and iCal.

It’s a thin market, but I considered and tested a dozen Windows calendar apps. I attempted to connect them to my personal and work calendars, spent time adding appointments, and left them on for a while so I could get a feel for what using them day-to-day is like. Based on that experience, here are the four apps I think work best for Windows users.

The best Windows calendar apps at a glance

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The best Windows calendar for most people

Microsoft Outlook (Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone/iPad)

Microsoft Outlook pros:

Microsoft Outlook cons: 

Microsoft Outlook needs no introduction—it’s been part of Microsoft Office since the ’90s. As of 2024, it comes free with Windows 11, in part to replace the now-defunct Windows Calendar app.

This application combines your email, calendar, contact management, and task list all in one interface, and the calendar is one of the four panes that make up the program. This tight integration among apps lets you do things like respond to any email with a meeting invite, which will automatically populate your calendar. You can also easily set up appointments with co-workers, if your organization uses Exchange calendar sharing. 

The calendar pane of Outlook is quite feature complete, if a little cluttered at times. In the left panel, there’s the monthly view for the current and upcoming month, above a list of the currently open calendars. To the right are your appointments, which you can view in a day, week, month, or schedule view. Adding appointments is quick using the mouse or keyboard shortcuts..

Microsoft Outlook is built to sync with Microsoft 365 and Exchange calendars but it also supports other services, including Google Calendar and Yahoo calendar.

With Zapier’s Outlook integrations, you can also easily connect Outlook to thousands of other services to automate your work processes. Learn more about how to automate Microsoft Outlook, or get started with one of these examples.

Microsoft Outlook price: Free with Windows 11. Microsoft 365 starts at $6.99/month.

The best Windows calendar for connecting to every platform on earth

OneCalendar (Windows)

OneCalendar pros:

• Syncs with every calendar platform on earth

• Interface focuses on the calendar

• Can print your calendar (Premium version only)

OneCalendar cons:

OneCalendar isn’t the prettiest app to look at—it was originally built in the Windows 8 era, and it looks like it. Get over that aesthetic hangup, though, and you’ll find a solid calendar that can sync with a staggering number of platforms. Try to add an account, and you’ll be offered Microsoft, Exchange, Google, iCloud, CalDAV, WebCal, Yahoo, GMX, mailbox.org, Nextcloud, Synology, and ownCloud. If you can’t connect your calendar of choice to OneCalendar, it’s probably made of paper.

Your appointments take up the entire window, other than a small toolbar on the right-hand side that you can use to switch between day, week, month, year, and list views (you can hide this sidebar if you want). There’s also the ability to print your calendar (though this isn’t offered in the free version). Adding appointments is quick, and there’s support for showing your appointments in the Windows lock screen. 

If your calendar of choice can’t sync Outlook or Windows Calendar, OneCalendar is what you should be checking out.

OneCalendar pricing: Free; $5.99 one-time payment for unlocking features like custom colors and printing

The best open source calendar app for Windows

Mozilla Thunderbird (Windows, macOS, Linux)

Mozilla Thunderbird pros:

• Completely free and open source

• Syncs with a variety of platforms

• Community-built extensions available

Mozilla Thunderbird cons:

Mostly thought of as an email client, Mozilla Thunderbird has a solid built-in calendar. The main view is a little cluttered: the left panel shows the current month above a list of calendars, all beside a right panel split vertically between a list of upcoming appointments and a traditional calendar view. 

But that calendar view works well: it can show you the day, week, multiple weeks, or an entire month. Adding appointments is easy using either the mouse or the keyboard shortcut.

It used to be hard to add services like Google Calendar to Thunderbird, but not anymore—you can now log in and see your account immediately. If a service you use isn’t supported, though, you can probably add support using community-built add-ons. Speaking of: this is where Thunderbird really shines: as an open source application, Thunderbird has attracted a wide variety of developers and hobbyists, all of whom have tweaked Thunderbird to work just the way they want. Whether it’s adding support for online calendars or looking at your appointments in a Gantt view, Thunderbird extensions give you flexibility the other apps on this list do not.

Mozilla Thunderbird price: Free

A few alternatives for a Windows calendar

If you don’t love any of the above options, here are a few more things to look into:

• As I mentioned: Windows 11 used to come with a calendar app called Windows Calendar. That application is no longer supported and will stop working by the end of 2024; Microsoft suggests users switch to Outlook for Windows, which is now free for Windows users.

• Rainlendar adds calendar widgets to your desktop, and it can even sync with other services if you’re willing to pay. It hasn’t aged well since its early 2010s release, though, especially on modern displays. Also, it’s hard to pronounce.

• Some of the best Windows to-do list apps, including TickTick, offer a built-in calendar.

• There’s nothing stopping you from using Google Calendar in your browser of choice; it just won’t give you that native desktop experience.

• Or you could give up and switch to a paper-based productivity system. I won’t judge. 

Related reading:

This article was originally published in March 2023. The most recent update was in March 2024.

Ever struggle to stay on top of your emails? We’ve all been there. Whether you’re the Inbox Zero type who needs a clean inbox at all times, or the chaotic type that lets the unopened emails pile up (that’s me), the pain is universal.

But there’s a better way to approach your inbox, and you don’t have to know any code or set up complex systems to make it happen. With Zapier, you can automate your email through automatic workflows—which we call Zaps—so you can scale your business. 

From automatically sending personalized emails, saving personal attachments, and writing tailored messages with AI, these are the best ways to benefit from email automation.

Skip ahead

Send personalized emails automatically

Perhaps sending emails is cutting into your actual work time. For example, you send the same reminder email to coworkers or clients, or you spend more time than necessary getting the wording just right on a cold email. With a few Zaps, you can automate that work—and even add AI into the mix to do the writing.

Send templated emails with a personal touch

Sometimes an email needs a personal touch, but when you’re thanking everyone who attended an event or sending a thoughtful message to every new lead you acquire, it can be tough to find the time or sound creative.

With one template email, Zapier can personalize the messages and send them out automatically. You can start with a spreadsheet for one-off outreach lists, but you can also send automated emails for new survey responders, to thank new Shopify customers, and much more.

When customizing your Zap in the Zap Editor, you can use contact information from your trigger app as placeholder fields when writing your email template. Zapier will then populate those placeholder fields with the right information anytime your Zap runs, making your email appear as if a human wrote it.

What if you want to delay sending your email for a specific amount of time? With Zapier’s Delay step—available on our paid plans—it will tell your Zap to wait until the time that you want before completing its action.

Write tailored messages with AI

Even if you do set up email templates, you might want to shift away from sending the same copy over and over. Or, you might want a quick and scalable way to send tailored emails based on unique information about a prospect or a customer. In that case, you can add AI into the mix. 

You can use these Zaps to write email responses to customers based on what they’ve asked, send welcome emails to new course registrants, and write messages from scratch.

Send emails on a schedule

Zapier’s built-in Schedule app triggers actions in other apps at a set time, such as every day, week, month, or even hour.

Start your Zap with a Schedule trigger and add the details you want—such as the day of the week or the time of day. Then add your email app in the action step to send an email to yourself or anyone else. When you turn the Zap on, Zapier will send those emails according to the schedule you set, so you don’t have to worry about sending reminder emails.

Organize your inbox

There are many reasons inboxes get out of control. Whether you need to save file attachments to your drive, star emails that require action, or generate a summary of your most important emails, there’s no point doing it all manually. These automatic workflows will help you stay on top of your most important work. 

Turn emails into tasks

Many emails demand some kind of action, whether it’s a bill reminder or a request from your manager. Treating your inbox like a task manager is usually disastrous, but copying and pasting emails into your to-do list app isn’t ideal either.

Depending on your email app, you can set up your Zap to look rely on a search string or look for a specific label to mark messages you want to turn into tasks. Then, Zapier will automatically add only those emails to your task manager of choice. The next time you check your to-do list, the actionable emails will be there for you to check off.

Use AI to label and summarize your emails

If you need to add a little more organization to your inbox, you can use AI tools (like ChatGPT or Mem) to automatically label new emails based on their contents. Or, if you don’t have time to go through your emails one by one, you can generate quick summaries and have them delivered to you or your team directly in your team chat app. 

That way, you can start prioritizing your emails with more ease and spend less time sifting through the noise.

Save attachments automatically

Repeat after me: Your inbox shouldn’t be storage for your files. Treating your inbox that way easily leads to accidentally deleting an important file you never saved elsewhere. Save yourself the hassle of forwarding, transferring, or saving email attachments by using one of the following Zaps to automatically save important email attachments to a cloud storage app.

You can also accomplish this in your notes app. Want to keep track of emailed receipts or other important information? You can add a filter step—available on our paid plans—to watch for those messages, and have Zapier save a copy to your notebook.

Take action on important information

Sometimes, you’ll need to save your emails—or their contents—elsewhere. From logging important emails in a database for future reference, to parsing important information (like a contact’s email address), these automatic workflows will do the heavy lifting for you. 

Keep an email log

Have you ever kept an email longer than you needed to “just in case”? You can keep your inbox clean without losing the content of that conversation. These Zaps will log a copy of those emails in a spreadsheet or chat app whenever they come in.

Share articles with your team

As a writer, a lot of the work I carry out involves researching topics and reading articles. Sometimes, I’ll need to share those pieces with my team members if we’re writing about the same topic. 

If you, too, want to share online articles automatically, you can use these Zaps to do so from an RSS feed or WordPress site.

Perhaps you’re not a writer, but you regularly share industry news with your coworkers, or you send articles from reputable news sources to your grandmother. You can set up a Zap that will automatically email saved articles from a bookmarking app like Pocket to recipients. It’s like a mini-newsletter with minimal effort.

Parse information from emails

Sometimes the info you need from emails is buried in the text. Zapier’s built-in Email Parser app will scan your emails for the text you need and send it to any app you want. Need emails parsed in bulk? An app like Mailparser.io will get the job done.

Streamline your email automation

There are many reasons inboxes get out of control. But with a few automatic workflows, you can easily stay on top of your day—and your business. Whether you need to automatically store important attachments elsewhere, or send personalized emails to customers at scale, you can make your email automation a breeze.

This article was originally published In November 2018 by Matt Guay, with previous contributions by Krystina Martinez. It was most recently updated in February 2024 by Elena Alston.