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Your artificially enhanced writing speed in Gmail does not mean that now is the best time to hit send. You can get much more out of your emails by scheduling them.
Scheduling email will make you a more considerate colleague and a more effective professional.
Publishers, comms agencies and social media professionals already schedule almost anything. Now, engineers can, too.
How to schedule email
How to schedule email
Scheduling is easy: From the compose window, click the arrow next to the Send button and select Schedule send. Then, select a date and time. Done!
How to find (and change) scheduled email
How to find (and change) scheduled email
You can find all your scheduled mail in a special outbox called "scheduled". There, you can change them, cancel sending or send them immediately.
Ideas on getting more out of scheduled emails
Ideas on getting more out of scheduled emails
Productivity
Productivity
Avoid emailing on off-hours - especially if it is urgent-sounding or you have a team (that doesn't know how to control their notifications). You can spare your team a lot of pressure and angst by scheduling your weekend emailing sprees to go out Monday morning.
Create free time by scheduling reminders and follow-ups in advance - no need to turn on the computer when the time comes around.
Send emails to a lot of people by breaking big numbers of recipients into separate emails, sent over consecutive days. This is a way to preserve your Gmail limits.
Send yourself reminders. If you are the complete email person, Scheduled Send is the companion to snoozing received emails for you.
Marketing
Marketing
Send emails when people are most likely to read it. Social media marketing will tell you to avoid Fridays, afternoons - so now you can, reliably.
Send emails when people are prepared - like after they come back from a meeting, after they have read something. I sometimes schedule emails for Monday, 8am.
Send when people are back from vacation. If your email truly needs to be looked at first, this puts in on top of their pile. Good thing Gmail shows when people are back in the office!
Execute a consistent strategy if you send emails regularly - tutorials, help articles, status reports, reminders, blog posts.
Be more humane
Be more humane
Give yourself a cool-down period for emotional/heated conversations. Think of an "undo send" period as long as you like - preferably timed for the next morning. While the email waits to be sent, you can cancel it.
Avoid appearing greedy or needy. Sometimes it's better not to respond right away, though the info is still fresh in your mind (and you only want to touch emails once, right?).
Schedule birthday wishes and the like well in advance. You can be that person, even if you cannot remember what you ate yesterday.
Bonus: Scheduling and productivity
Bonus: Scheduling and productivity
Decoupling writing from sending (and automating it!) means: You can sit down to process your inbox and to write what needs to be written, in one go. No need to wait until the right time, just put some focus time on your calendar.
Bonus: An antidote to urgency
Bonus: An antidote to urgency
Immediate, rapid-fire emails are the opposite of scheduled emails. This tool gives you a way to de-accelerate your and your recipients' day.
Bonus: Getting on top of their pile
Bonus: Getting on top of their pile
Scheduling your email so that it appears more prominently can be thought of as an publishing arms race. The more people use it, the less effective it becomes.
I will argue that enterprise Gmail is primarily used for human-to-human communication. Scheduling requires individual, additional care for each email you send. That one email you sent at the right time is more considerate (and would have been on their pile anyway).
We discussed how you can schedule emails easily, and the many reasons for doing so. You can be more productive, do entirely new things and help everyone deal better with email. Try it out today! I guess I will be receiving more emails on Monday than I used to - as long as that brings down total email volume, I'll take it. Thank you for reading!
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#gmailPublished 2019-05-05 by Holger Matthies.Republished 2022-02-17 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2022-02-17 by Holger Matthies.Written listening to Galantis - Steel.
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