A semester is roughly five courses, five professors, two or three TAs, an advisor, and a few hundred emails. Every one of those emails is the only copy of something you will need later: the week office hours moved, what the midterm actually covers, which lab report is worth twenty percent.
You read each one carefully, exactly once, and then it goes into the pile. In week nine you search "office hours" and get forty-one results across five courses, most of them from a professor you're no longer taking.
Every Course Is Already a Contact Record
Here is the thing that makes this work: your professors email you from a fixed address, all semester, about one subject. That is precisely the shape of a CRM contact — one person, one running history, everything they've ever told you attached to their name.
Sales teams have used this shape for thirty years. It is not complicated. A contact holds notes, deadlines, and the messages themselves, and it stays put when your memory doesn't.
The mapping is almost embarrassingly direct:
- Contact — the professor, TA, advisor, or group partner
- Note — office hours, exam scope, how they want work submitted
- Task — an assignment with a due date
- Activity — the email itself, kept on the record
Saving a Professor Takes One Click
Open the email. The sidebar has already read the sender and filled in the name, the address, and the institution. You press Create contact and it is saved into your own Google Contacts — not into some app's database you'll lose access to.
The Note You Will Want in Week Nine
Take the email at the top of this article. Office hours moved from Thursday 2–4 to Wednesday 1–3 in Herrick 210. The midterm covers chapters five through nine, weighted toward cellular respiration.
That is two facts you will want twice more this semester and will not remember either time. Written as a note against the professor, they stop being something you have to find.
Deadlines Become Tasks — and Show Up in Google Tasks
"Lab report 3 is due Friday at 11:59pm. Late reports lose a letter grade per day." That is a task, and it is sitting in the middle of a paragraph about something else.
Adding it takes one line. Because tasks are written to Google Tasks, it then appears in the sidebar of Gmail and Calendar and on your phone, alongside everything else you already track — not in a separate app you'd have to remember to open.
What One Course Looks Like After Five Minutes
One email in, the record now carries the office-hours note, the deadline, and the original message. Next time that professor emails you, all of it is sitting there before you've finished reading the first line.
Do that for five professors and you have replaced the thing you were actually doing, which was re-reading old email and hoping.
Rename "Deals" to "Courses"
The one piece of vocabulary that won't fit is deals. You are not closing anything.
In Settings you can rename that label — call it Courses, or Projects, or turn the section off entirely from Customize this page. Set it to Courses and each one becomes a container for the professor, the deadlines, and the notes attached to it. BIO 214 stops being a folder in your head.
A Word About Your .edu Address
Worth saying plainly, because it will matter to you in a few years: most universities close or wipe alumni accounts some time after graduation. Anything living only in a school inbox goes with it.
Simple CRM stores nothing on our servers. Contacts go to Google Contacts, notes and courses to Google Sheets in your Drive, tasks to Google Tasks, files to Drive. It is your data, in your account, in ordinary formats.
That cuts both ways, so be deliberate: install it on the account you intend to keep. If your .edu address is the one you live in day to day, use it — but export the Drive folder before your access ends, and you keep every record. Four years of advisors, recommendation-letter threads and project notes are worth more after graduation than during it.
Getting Started
Install it from the Google Workspace Marketplace, open any email from a professor, and press Create contact. There is no setup, no import, and no empty database asking to be filled in — it opens already holding the Google Contacts you have.
It is free for fourteen days, no card. After that it is $15 a month or $149 a year.