Boomerang Provides a Suite of Email and Productivity Tools to Improve Digital Wellness and Communication

TL; DR: Productivity is an essential quality to encourage in the workplace. But productivity can often be confused with overworking. When employees work more than they should, it can encroach on their personal time and leave them feeling burnt out or less satisfied with their jobs. Boomerang is a productivity tool that takes a different approach. It helps users improve their communication processes to work smarter, produce more, and reclaim time. We spoke with Aye Moah, CEO and Co-Founder of Boomerang, about the email extension platform, its patented Magic Live calendar, and insights for improving work/life balance.

It’s often said that quality is better than quantity. But many times, the reality of work seems to manifest the opposite. Companies are pushing for productivity in the workplace by any means necessary and have implemented new technologies and processes to improve output. A report by CNBC, however, reveals the true state of the work landscape, stating employees are working more and producing less, with financial stress at its highest since 2008.

If this report is telling us anything, it is that maybe working more isn’t the most viable solution to productivity after all. Especially since overworking can lead to burnout, making people less productive. Instead, businesses can look for ways to improve efficiency and employee engagement so people can work smarter, not harder. And they can start by employing productivity tools built to help people reclaim their time.

“Boomerang is centered on creating tools that meaningfully improve its users’ lives. We don’t believe in productivity for productivity’s sake but rather in productivity so that our users can have more time to do what they love,” said Aye Moah, CEO and Co-Founder of Boomerang.

Aye told us that Boomerang is committed to creating tools that enhance productivity and do so with consideration and courtesy for the user, two things current productivity tools often abandon. Its tools allow users to improve overall work/life balance by helping them set boundaries and work more efficiently.

Boomerang’s email extension suite includes a one-click meeting scheduling calendar, an AI email writer assistant, and email pausing feature, among other management tools. Users can leverage Boomerang to create the balance they need at work and home.

Boomerang was created by Alex Moore, Mike Chin, and Aye Moah in 2010. Since then, Boomerang has grown to become a multi-million dollar company, serving more than 1 million businesses and 200 million users worldwide. Its most notable users include Twilio, Lyft, and Square. In 2021, Aye stepped into the CEO role after serving as the CPO for a decade.

More than 500 million emails have been sent through the Boomerang platform, marking an incredible milestone for a company that only started with $400,000 in funding. Its email extension has a suite of tools that covers several areas, including meeting scheduling, content creation, and management.

“Our feature set provides everything you need to establish smarter email workflows and build boundaries to manage digital wellness. With our email productivity tools, you can create more effective, responsive email communication workflows,” said Aye.

Boomerang helps streamline email management, allowing users to take back their time. Its solution can do a myriad of things, including send reminders for follow-ups, archive messages until they are needed, and schedule emails to send later. It also has response tracking.

“The average knowledge worker checks their email every six minutes, making it difficult to complete tasks and cutting into personal time. So users employ our inbox management software to reduce time spent scouring their emails,” said Aye.

Its inbox software can reduce interruptions and help people focus on more pressing tasks. Users can download the Boomerang extension for Gmail, Outlook, and mobile (iOS and Android). All major browsers, including Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, also support Boomerang.

Boomerang has a remarkable history of innovation. Its founding team was the first to bring an email productivity extension to the SaaS product category. The team also accomplished a massive achievement that has become a mainstay in the email industry: the invention of email snoozing. Yep, they created that. And Boomerang’s passion for innovation has not died down.

“Our patented Magic Live Calendar creates a clickable, always-live image directly in the body of the email to provide one-click scheduling, which removes unnecessary steps for your attendee,” said Aye.

Adding to its list of patents, Boomerang’s Magic Live Calendar is its latest invention. It allows users to automate their meeting scheduling and smooth out the process for the email recipient: no more back-and-forth messages or double bookings. Teams can embed Boomerang’s calendar into their email messages, and guests can book a date without navigating away from the message.

Watch on

“Users have booked 120% more meetings than with a traditional scheduling link and saved over 160,000 hours of scheduling time over manual methods. We recently launched team scheduling features for Gmail, which extends the benefits to mid-size to enterprise-level companies,” said Aye.

The Boomerang team has also modernized its platform by integrating AI. Its AI writing assistant, Respondable, helps users write actionable and relevant emails in real time. Trained by data from millions of messages, Respondable uses machine-learning techniques to analyze an email message to determine its probability of evoking a response.

“It takes into account a variety of factors, including subject length, reading level, word count, and a number of questions. It then suggests adjustments to craft an email most likely to elicit a response,” said Aye.

Boomerang puts people at the center of productivity. The team’s mission is to provide tools to improve productivity and communication while instilling better work/life balance practices. Many people struggle to enforce their work/life boundaries when their office is next to their kitchen. And Boomerang sets out to be the solution to help draw that line.

“Too often, we see productivity tools created so users can do even more work, but the ethos around Boomerang is completely different. Our tools exist to meaningfully improve the lives of our users, so it’s less about doing more work and more about living fully by reclaiming our time,” said Aye.

Aye said companies in some countries are pushing for Right to Disconnect laws or employee wellness policies to remove the blurred lines between work and home time. Boomerang already has features that can set up that boundary between work and home life. For example, its Inbox Pause feature stops emails from entering an inbox until the user is ready, ending interruptions and blocking off work from personal time.

Boomerang is currently working on new features to add to its growing set, and listening to customer feedback has been key in its development process.

“We listen to our customer feedback to ensure we’re building the tools they need, and providing Boomerang for teams was one of those areas. We also have new features that will be released later this year that will make Inbox Pause even more vital to defining boundaries around work hours versus downtime,” said Aye.