Compose Now. Send Later.

I love tools. Anything I can use to do things faster. Automation is my friend.

As someone who works from home, I don’t always keep conventional hours. During the school year, I am at my desk fairly reliable but in the summer I’m working at all kinds of times. Day, night, whenever.

One of my favorite tricks is an email trick. Just because I’m working at midnight, doesn’t mean my email needs to be sent at midnight. I use a little program called MailButler that allows me to compose my emails, and choose a date and time for them to send.

All my emails come directly into MacMail. I have a lot of email accounts, and people sometimes ask me which one to use. But it doesn’t really matter, because they all land in the same inbox. So if an email comes in at 10PM, and I want to go ahead and knock out a response so that the work is done, but I don’t want people to think I’m so nerdy that I’m sitting at my desk working at 10PM (cough) then I can use SendLater to schedule that email.

When I open my email program, I have an extra send button right next to the regular send button, with a clock on it. If I use that button, a special popup will give me options for sending. Do I want to send at a particular time in the future or maybe just a few hours in the future? I have all these options in SendLater. My favorite option is the “Tomorrow 8AM” option. My workday generally starts at 7:15 (I prefer to work early and be done early) but 8 AM is a nice time to shoot out emails. Often times at 8AM I’ll hear the swoosh of scheduled emails rolling out.

It’s also nice that all those emails are sitting in the outbox, because if I forgot to add something to one of them, I can go back, open it up, and update it. Or if I change my mind and need to send it right away, I can do that too. Or I can delete it, if I decide I no longer need it.

SendLater is just another one of my favorite little tools that makes my workday easier.