Why you should delay sending your emails all the time!

I once sent an email to my husband to let him know what I had planned for dinner that night. I put dinner in the subject, typed his first name and pressed Enter, then send….. all good so far…

About an hour later I received an email from someone named Paul, (which is my husband’s name) saying… “..I don’t think this is for me, but dinner sounds nice” ????????.

Of course I was mortified!!

But then I realised because emailing is soooo easy we often just send them off without checking some “fine” details.

As a result, I now delay sending ALL my emails by about 30 minutes.

When I tell people this their eyes often bulge and they say, “I could never do that”.

Even though the chance of you doing something wrong such as emailing the wrong person is slim, when it happens, it terrible. Especially if it is sensitive information such as client pricing, internal confidential documents sent to someone externally… the list goes on.

When you set up email to delay sending you can CHOOSE to force the email to be sent immediately, by clicking Send/Receive or you can leave it to be sent at the designated time.

Here’s 3 Great Reasons Why You Should Delay Sending on Your Emails:

  1. If you accidently put the wrong email address in because you just clicked the first name that came up, you have a “window” to catch your email and delete or edit it and resend it.
  2. If you forget to attach additional files you can go back and attach them – these days Outlook will tell you if you mention file or attachment in your message and you haven’t actually attached a file. Great if you are only sending one file, but what if you forget to attach multiple files? Delay sending means you can open the message and attach the additional files.
  3. If you realise you needed to add additional information but forgot, rather than having to send a second (or third or fourth) email, simply open the message in the Outbox, edit it then send.
  4. If you realise you needed to add additional names to the To field. Nothing worse than forgetting to include your manager in an email and then having to resend it individually later ????.
  5. If you realise maybe your response was created whilst you were stressed, angry or frustrated and that perhaps you didn’t choose your “words” as well as you should.

Want to know how to set up delay sending in Microsoft Outlook?

Check out this short video I made

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