A few years ago, Gmail added a nifty feature tucked into the main “Send” button to “Schedule Send”. Pressing that button will open a prompt for when you want to send it, and then it essentially hides the email and sends it at the appropriate time.

I use this feature occasionally, but an article from Deb Tennen lists some reasons why you might consider scheduling almost every email that you send.

Her core argument is based on these four reasons:

1. You have more time to change your mind. You can “undo send” in Gmail for a matter of seconds, but scheduling an email for later in the day gives you plenty of time if you change your mind.
2. You can hide your working hours. In some cases, it can look bad to send an email at 10pm, so this can make it look like you send it during normal hours. The idea here isn’t to be deceitful, but to encourage worktime communication with your clients and coworkers.
3. You can respond immediately while avoiding the ping-pong. Respond right away, get that email off your plate, but know that it won’t be seen by the other party for a few hours.
4. Save some stress from both parties. Many people clear out their inboxes on Friday afternoons, but that often means adding clutter to other inboxes. Send your email on Friday afternoon, but schedule it go out on Monday.

For me, my biggest concern is that a follow-up might show up in that same thread during the “sent but scheduled” window and it could make me look bad. For example:

• Client: “Should we make this red or blue?”
• My response: “Red would be ideal because of a, b, c” (schedule send for later)
• Client, before my scheduled email goes out: “Actually, we discussed internally and we’re going with blue.”
• My initial response finally goes through, and seems really weird in that new context.

I very well may be over-thinking this. Double emails like that are fairly rare, and there’s still a chance you would see the new message from the client and then edit or cancel your old response before it went out.

Deb also shares a few tips for improvement, including the idea to schedule those emails for random times. If they always go out at 9:00 on the dot, that could look weird. It’s kind of like the out-of-control email automation I shared a few years ago when every email showed up at 10:57am.

I can’t see using it as much as Deb suggests, but I do think I’ll start using it more often when it matches up with her four tips. Be sure to check out her full post for more.

How often do you use a “schedule send” feature?

We have a lot of things being thrown our way. In a typical day, most of us will have to deal with requests coming via email, text messages, social media, to-do lists and a variety of other places. It can be a lot!

As Khe Hy said in a recent post, many of us often have three problems:

1. I never have enough time
2. I have a futile fixation of getting it all done
3. I’m overwhelmed by the number of inputs in my life

There’s not an easy solution to this, but a few small shifts can help.

First, “never having enough time” is often something put on us by others. If you find yourself with too little time to get everything done, the issue may be more with your priorities than your available time.

Second, getting a tight grip on your inputs is essential. I laid this out in-depth in The Digital Efficiency Framework, but you really have three kinds of inputs coming at you:

• Controlled Inputs, where you have tight control of everything in there. This is generally things like your daily flashcards and your consumption list (such as apps like Pocket).
• Variable Inputs, where you have some control with things such as email, RSS feeds, and the quick notes that you leave for yourself (which may be inspired by things that others tell you to do). The key here is that all of those have a solid ending and can be worked to zero.
• Uncontrolled Inputs, like social media and news sites. They’ll go on and on and on as long as you let them.

The solution is simple in theory, but hard to pull off; have more controlled inputs and fewer uncontrolled ones. Add great articles to Pocket instead of browsing Instagram. Follow people you respect via RSS instead of Facebook. Little things add up.

Depending on your role you may or may not be able to impact it much, but I’m trying to sort my life around controlled inputs as much as possible to help keep the “overwhelming” inputs at bay.

When people say they don’t have time to exercise, visit with friends, or just relax, they’re likely telling the truth. Their calendar is full and things can get tight.

A big (somewhat hidden) reason for this is social media, which on average consumes nearly 2-1/2 hours every single day (source). Where did that time come from? People were plenty busy before social media came along, but we’ve found ways to squeeze an extra 147 minutes into every single day.

I think the reasoning behind this is two-fold:

First, you have Parkinson’s Law (“work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion“) coming into effect. People may take more time every day to mess around on social media, but still find ways to get their work done. In a way, you could say it enhances their productivity because they have to get more done in less time.

This was shown in a funny manner on “The Office” back in season 3. When Jan (the big boss) showed up unexpectedly, while most of the staff was watching a movie, she asked “How would a movie increase productivity?”.

Michael’s response? “People would work faster after. They’d have to, to make up for the time lost watching the movie.”

Here’s the clip if you’ve never seen it:

The other side is that people’s priorities shift around, which is really the appropriate response to someone being too busy. You are absolutely not “too busy” to make that change in your life, but it’s just not a priority for you.

Take your time back

For most of us, we’re on social media more often that we probably should be, so that time is easy to take back. Seth Godin famously isn’t on social media at all, which helps explain why he’s able to produce so many books, podcasts and blog posts.

You’ve made room in your life for social media (and hundreds of other things), so if you want to make room for something more important you have some low-hanging fruit that you can move out of the way to get things started.

In computing, a parity check is “the process that ensures accurate data transmission between nodes during communication“. In other words, it’s a simple test that will help make sure that the data being sent is the same as the data being received and that nothing was lost along the way. They’re imperfect checks, but they’ll catch (and help to fix) many potential errors.

We need more parity checks in our lives too.

The week ahead…

I’ve talked a good bit in the past about my process of running a “weekly preview” every Friday. It’s where I look at what’s coming up and try to catch any scheduling issues before they become a big problem.

In recent months, though, I’ve added one small thing to it. After I’ve looked at the week I send two simple emails — one to my wife and one to my business partner — with a quick outline of what’s coming up. Here’s an example:

The main benefit of those emails is simply to make sure we’re aligned on everything approaching next week, and 90% of the time all is smooth. However, on a few occasions they’ll write back and point out a conflict that I might have missed, such as “Why is that meeting on Thursday? We have that other thing on Thursday.” Discovering that a week ahead of time is much better than scrambling to solve it on Thursday morning.

A real example from a few weeks ago in my email to Ali I mentioned “I’ll be working from home on Monday since I don’t need to go in” and she quickly reminded me that our meeting with a client on Monday was in person, not on video chat. Had she not told me, I likely would have realized that when the meeting was starting and I was not in the right location. Great catch!

Not too much

With all things, though, there’s a balance to be struck here. I could send them both an email every day to discuss tomorrow, but that would add a whole lot of meta work and likely not be worth the effort.

Similarly, I try to pay attention to how much detail I put in my weekly emails to them. More is better, but only to a point. I try to stick to just a bullet point or two for each day with the highlights, simply to make sure we’re on the same page.

Parity checking won’t catch every error, but if it can fix a few then it’s worth doing.