Productivity Portfolio

I'm sure we've all occasionally failed to fully respond to an email. However, there is a subset of people that do this regularly. I often see this when people are responding to an email with many items. Many disciplined people I know are very good about keeping everything in their Drafts folder until the message is complete. Other people take Outlook offline until they're satisfied with their response.

The solutions above don't necessarily work for people who like to dash off replies. It's just against their nature. One way to catch some of these omissions is to tell Outlook to defer sending your messages for a number of minutes such as 10. This can be done by creating an outbound email rule. The extra 10 minutes gives you a nice time buffer to edit your email.

The nice part about using an Outlook rule is that you can define how broad you want the rule. For example, you may decide to apply the rule to all outbound emails. Or, you may decide to apply it only to people at a certain company or a specific subject matter.

To create an Outlook rule for deferred email delivery,

1. Open Microsoft Outlook

2. From the Tools menu, select Rules and Alerts

3. In the Rules and Alerts dialog, click New Rule

4. In the Rules Wizard dialog, select the radio button Start from a blank rule.

5. For Step 1, select Check messages after sending

6. Click Next to advance to conditions section.

If you want the rule to apply to all outbound emails, click Next. Otherwise, check the condition you would like. Some conditions need you to click the hyperlink in the bottom section to define the condition. For example, if you checked sent to people or distribution list, you need to click the hyperlink to specify which people.

7. If you set no conditions, click Yes to the rule will be applied to every message.

8. In the Select action(s) section, click defer delivery by a number of minutes.

9. In the lower section, click the hyperlink for a number of minutes

10. In the Deferred Delivery box, set your delay value.

11. Click OK

12. Click Next

13. Click Next again unless you need to set exceptions.

14. Specify a name for the rule such as Defer 10

15. Check the box Turn on this rule

16. Click Finish

17. Click OK

This rule won't solve all your email problems, but deferring it for a couple minutes does give you that extra little pause. Sometimes that 5 or 10 minute delay can make a huge difference if it allows you the opportunity to reflect and correct.

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