If you send more than a few emails in a day, then like me you have definitely had the moments where you:
- either after hitting the send button you realize you forgot the attachment
- or you realize you didn’t copy someone
- or you realize that you wanted to add a couple more points
- our you suddenly get that fear that you copied someone who wasn’t supposed to be copied
or any number of face-palm moments where you wish you could go back and fix the email that your sent. But its too late now. Well, like me, if you use Outlook, there is a way by which you can almost fix the email after you send it.
Introducing the “Don’t Send Stupid Emails” rule (now you can name it whatever you want, but this is what I call it). You will need to be familiar with the Rules functions in Outlook (a basic intro is here). So, the trick is to create a rule that works on outgoing emails. Here’s what the rule looks like (again, I am not going to talk about how to create the rule itself):
So, I basically put a rule that defers the sending of every email I write by 2 minutes. So, every email I send, waits for a couple of minutes in my Outbox before Outlook sends it out. This gives me a chance to quickly go to the Outbox, open the email, correct whatever was wrong with it, and then send it again. This rule is so useful (for me at least) that it helps me a couple of times a week at least.
And notice the last line of the rule. What if you wanted to send an email right now. Well, I put an exception in the rule. If Outlook detects that the email I just sent belongs to the “Send Now” category, then it doesn’t defer the sending and sends it right away. I basically created a custom category called “Send Now” before adding the exception to the rule. And now, when I need to send an email immediately, I go to the options while writing the email and choose the “Send Now” category before hitting the Send button.
That’s it. This little rule can help you a lot if you are writing even a few emails a day (or a lot of emails, like I do).