Scheduled emails in GMail and other mail clients

There is a really neat feature in GMail that you should make more use of: scheduled emails. Here are two use cases I’ve used it for so far.

The first use case is related to the right to disconnect. When you are about to send an email late at night, during the week-end or during your holidays, you can remove the pressure off your colleagues by scheduling it to be sent the next day at 8:00 or the next Monday. If you feel you need to send emails out of working hours to impress or push your coworkers, you have bigger problems ; I suggest you discuss with a coach, a mentor or some external counsel.

The second use case I (naively) only came about recently is to send a reminder email to someone or a team in the future. In my case it is a timely reminder to prepare a recurring conversation. I can write it when I think about it (e.g. at the end of the conversation) but have it delivered right before the next conversation.

I love tools that let you do something and peacefully forget about it. One day I’ll write a blog on Getting Things Done and how I organize my actions but it is based on this kind of trickery: make sure your brain remembers things when it needs to. Related to that, I do not send myself emails in the future nor snooze them because my source of truth for work items are not my emails.