I check my emails a few times a day – the last time during the end of the afternoon. When I started this routine a few years ago, I loved the efficiency and concentration it brought to my days. I wasn’t being distracted in the middle of the day by emails; many “emergencies” were resolved before I even checked the email; and I was able to bust through 100 or so messages within a few minutes because of sorting by subject. It was awesome … until I realized that I wasn’t getting as many responses to my emails as I used to. I would send a request or reply in the evening and receive nothing. Most of my emails got lost under the fold by the time my customers arrived at the office the next day. What could I do? I didn’t want to go back to the old way of doing emails – this new process was too effective. My dilemma brings me to this Tuesday’s idea…
Idea for this Tuesday: Delay delivery of your emails until early morning.
I knew there had to be a way to schedule delivery of an email to a future time, and within about 40 seconds I found it. I use Outlook, but I’m sure other email applications have the same feature. In Outlook, start a new email. Select Options -> Delay Delivery, and then schedule the email to be sent “Not Before” the date and time you enter.
A few helpful techniques that I learned the hard way:
- Before typing the email, select the time. I’ve hit “send” before scheduling the email many times and an email that I meant to arrive the next morning goes out immediately. It’s usually not a huge deal unless your greeting is “Good morning” and you just sent it during the late afternoon.
- Make sure your email will be connected at the delivery time. I travel quite a bit, so I have to beware that I’m not on a plane when my emails are scheduled to be delivered. I might plug in when I arrive at my hotel that night and have seven emails go out that should’ve been sent that morning.
- Blind copy yourself. Once you start implementing this idea of delaying your emails, you’ll begin to schedule emails a week or more in the future. If you don’t bcc yourself, you won’t remember that it was sent.
- Make a mental note of the emails you have scheduled in case something happens in the interim. I once sent an email to a client asking her for an update on our agreement. I didn’t want to be a pest and knew my contact had been on vacation, so I scheduled it for Thursday morning. I received the agreement from her boss on Tuesday, but forgot to cancel my email to her. When she received my email, she was confused. Luckily she reached me on my phone before calling her boss and complaining to him.
Try this idea. You’ll like it – and so will your customers, co-workers, and prospects. They’ll be receiving your emails in the morning before all the chaos begins!
