The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

It is at times like these when you want to have the cake and eat it too. You want to send the emails so that the inbox is emp­ty and every­thing is fin­ished before the week­end, but also not have sent them (since you real­ly do not want any more replies right now).

Most email­ing-clients and ‑pro­grams have a func­tion for sched­ul­ing the actu­al send­ing of the email you have writ­ten. It is in sit­u­a­tions like this when the fea­ture real­ly comes in handy and you should make full use of it.

Do this

If you some­times need to send an email at anoth­er time than when you wrote it and still have not got­ten acquaint­ed with the sched­ul­ing-func­tion, do so right now.

• In Out­look for Win­dows, select the ​”More options”-arrow from the Tags-group in the Rib­bon when you are com­pos­ing an email. You will find instruc­tions from Microsoft right here.
• If you are using Out­look for Mac, click the arrow next to the ​”Send”-button and choose to ​”Send lat­er” after which you set a date and time for the email’s depar­ture. You will find detailed instruc­tions on how to do it here.
• If you use Mail (macOS), get your­self a plu­g­in that pro­vides you with the delay-func­tion. You could, for exam­ple, use Mail­but­ler, a ser­vice I have per­son­al­ly found very helpful.
• When email­ing in Gmail, you use the ​“Sched­ule Send” fea­ture by click­ing the small arrow on the right side of the ​“Send” but­ton. Google describes this fea­ture fur­ther here.

Email when­ev­er you want to with­out keep­ing oth­ers in mind

If you use the func­tions that are avail­able for writ­ing first and send­ing lat­er, it will become much eas­i­er to work dur­ing the hours when you find it most con­ve­nient to respond to your emails with­out hav­ing to con­sid­er oth­er people’s work­ing hours or responses.

If you occa­sion­al­ly need to get some work done dur­ing the week­end but do not wish for your cowork­ers to feel pres­sured to do the same when they get emails from you late Sat­ur­day evening — well out­side of ordi­nary work­ing hours — you can eas­i­ly sched­ule the email to be sent on Mon­day morn­ing instead. A very neat solu­tion, if you ask me!

What’s your way?

How have you made your email­ing eas­i­er? Have you found anoth­er app, an add-on, or anoth­er plu­g­in that makes email­ing both eas­i­er and more fun? Tell me!

(Do you know these sev­en rules of email­ing eti­quette?)