How to Use Deferred Email

Procrastination is the subject of an entire chapter of my book, Get-it-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More. It’s common, and we usually think of it as our enemy. But anything that powerful can also be a force for good. Today, we’re going to procrastinate usefully. We’re going to procrastinate email. It’s possible to write email today, but delay it, so it actually arrives someday in the future. That little delay turns email from a tool for overload into a tool for making life way better.

Here are my 4 Quick and Dirty Tips to use deferred email to your advantage:

Tip #1: Slow Down Conversations

Some people use email like a conversation. You send them a brief note, and they reply with a 10-page missive telling you about the emotional hurdles they’ve tackled in getting over the death of their pet bird, Fluffy…11 years ago.

If you send your sympathetic reply immediately, you’ll be treated to an instantaneous response, with more heartfelt outbursts than one person should ever be subjected to.

Personal connection is important, but so is your sanity. When you’re in a conversation that’s distracting you from work, simply delay your responses. You can compose your homage to Fluffy the Bird now, and send it to be delivered in two days. You keep the connection going, but slow it down to a manageable pace.

Tip #2: Clear To-Do List Clutter

Sometimes to-do items appear that aren’t quite appropriate for today, but you don’t want them cluttering up your calendar or spending weeks on your to-do list. Here’s an example: Bernice realized that at some point, she’s going to have to tell her boyfriend Melvin that they’re getting married. She hasn’t decided when, however. If she adds it to her to-do list now, she’ll have to keep confronting, er, looking at it every time she handles her daily tasks. And she’s certainly not ready to schedule the announcement. Besides, if Melvin sees her to-do list or calendar, it would spoil the surprise.

Delayed email saves the day! Bernice just schedules two emails to herself to arrive in six weeks. The first email is a reminder to order Jim and Pam’s wedding episode from The Office. The second email is to buy cheese puffs, Melvin’s favorite snack food, for when they watch the episode together. She figures he’ll be so motivated by seeing Jim and Pam’s wonderful wedding that he’ll get the hint and propose. Then she can reveal that the wedding is already planned and just a few weeks away.

Tip #3: Defer Things You Don’t Want to Handle Now

Vice Chairman Europa also uses deferred email. In her case, it’s not so much about specific tasks as it is about big issues she’ll have to deal with (eventually). One of her business competitors has been stealing market share from her in three different economies. She knows she’ll need to do something about this (eventually), but she has other things to worry about right now. Competition hasn’t reached crisis proportions, and besides, her super-genius son Thomas hasn’t perfected the disintegrating ray, yet. It’s supposed to be available for beta-testing in six months. That will make negotiations much easier.

Europa sends herself a deferred email scheduled to arrive at the start of the beta test, in six months. In the email body, she includes links to the market intelligence about her competitor, plus her current thinking about the issue. When the email arrives, she can review the issue and deal with it then and there, defer it again, or decide it’s no longer a concern.

Tip #4: Get Your Documents Right When You Need Them

Melvin recently scheduled a trip to attend the American Birding Association’s convention. The travel site he used sent him his itinerary and receipt in an email. His train ticket came as a PDF file to print out, and his hotel confirmation was also sent by email.

Melvin uses deferred email to send himself reminder documents exactly when he needs them. He forwards his itinerary to himself twice. One copy arrives the morning he departs. The second copy arrives his last day of travel, so he has a reminder of his return details. The tickets are set to arrive half an hour before departure, so he can call them up on his smartphone.

He uses this same technique to send himself materials he’ll need for his meetings, so they arrive right before the meetings are scheduled to begin.. Deferred email gives him everything he needs, right when he needs it.

How to Send Deferred Email

One way to send deferred email is from your desktop email program. If you’re on Windows using Outlook, you can send deferred email when you’re composing a message. Write your message, then click Options, then under Delivery Ooptions, select Do Not Deliver Before and click the delivery date and time you want. If you use Thunderbird, you can use the Send Later 3 plug-in to send deferred email. The only problem is that you have to leave your desktop email program running, so it’s open at the time the email is scheduled to go out.

Several web services also let you send deferred email. You forward an email to a special email address and that message gets sent back to you in the future. For example, one such service is Followup.cc. You send email to 12hours@followup.cc to be reminded of that email conversation 12 hours in the future. It also lets you snooze reminder emails. It’s mainly set up to handle to-do items.

Nudgemail.com and laytr.com (yes l-a-y-t-r-dot-com, with a “y”) lets you simply forward email to yourself sometime in the future. They don’t have the snooze feature of followup.cc, but they’re more email centric, and laytr.com lets you send deferred email to other people, not just yourself.

If you use Gmail or Google Apps for email, you can use my personal favorite: BoomerangGmail.com. This is integrated as a browser plug-in for Gmail and it adds itself to Gmail’s interface. With a mouse click or two, you can defer email, have a conversation boomeranged back to you in a week, or send a message and get an automatic reminder if the other person hasn’t responded within the timeframe you specify.

To summarize: Choose one of the many tools out there that can send deferred email. Use it to slow down conversations, remind yourself of to-do items in the future, remind yourself of issues that you can’t deal with now but need to revisit later, and arrange for your materials to be where you want them, when you want them.

Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!

Image courtesy of Shutterstock