In praise of Schedule Send
I hate email. (I know, I’m writing an email newsletter. We contain multitudes.) I don’t even get that much of it. For me, email is not so much a time suck as it is a psychological sinkhole. When I check my email, I—and more to the point, my time and attention—become available to be pushed around by what other people want. It doesn’t really matter if when I open my inbox there are 20 emails or three or none. Just by opening it, I’ve said, I’m available to be told what to do and what to think about. I’ve made that availability more important than any priorities I’d already set. The worst part is, that availability feels like productivity, when it’s often at cross purposes with it. It feels good to give someone else something they need, or at least something they asked me for. There’s proof, in someone else’s inbox, that I exist and was “working.” Even if that work was something I didn’t care about or actually mean to be doing.
I’ve been checking my email as my first work task almost every day since I started working. That’s over a decade of feeling like I have to make sure I’ve gotten to what everyone else wants from me before I can turn to what I decided was most important. Obviously it should be the other way around! But often those little inbox tasks are easier than whatever I actually need to be doing, and if they take long enough, I can avoid the hard thing until I no longer have enough time for it that day. Which, honestly, is often my subconscious goal. Now that I’m writing a book though, this pattern has gone from mildly frustrating to actively destructive. So I’m finally making a real effort to change it.
Recently I’ve discovered an unexpected tool for minimizing my email anxiety and curbing my compulsion toward constant availability: Schedule Send. It’s just what it sounds like: you write an email, and then you schedule a time when it will be sent, with no further work or attention from you required. I’d always heard Schedule Send pitched as a way to avoid bothering your colleagues with emails during evenings and weekends, which is a great use for it. You can write your message whenever works for you, and send it at a time that presumably works better for your recipient. (Bosses: take note!) But I mostly use Schedule Send for a far more selfish reason. I use it to remove the chance of an immediate reply.
Here’s how it works for me. My most important use of email right now is scheduling interviews, and sometimes sending follow-up or fact-checking questions to sources. Introductory and scheduling interviews are tedious, I dread them, and I don’t want to waste my good morning energy on them. So I tend to write them in the late afternoon. But if I sent them in the late afternoon, 1) I might bother someone after work, which I try to avoid on principle, and 2) I would then spend my whole evening wondering if they’d written back yet. If I managed not to check for a reply before I went to bed—and that’s a big if—I would feel compelled to check first thing in the morning. These aren’t super urgent, news story interviews that need to happen as soon as possible; I usually suggest times starting at least two days out. But just knowing someone might have written back and I’m leaving them hanging is too much for my availability compulsion to bear. So I use Schedule Send to make it so those late-afternoon emails go out the following morning. And just like that, I can stop thinking about them until then.
I’m not saying availability and urgency should never be priorities. I’ve written plenty of emails for news stories that needed to be sent and responded to as soon as possible, no matter the time. And in the days before a piece is published or closed, I simply must be available for any last minute edits or questions. In those situations, my inbox is my priority, and it should be! But I’m trying to see availability and urgency as tools I can use when I need them, not as my baseline state. In my dream work day, I don’t check email until 3 p.m. Just writing that makes me feel guilty and a little sick. But I’m not trapped in an toxic, email-driven workplace, nor am I writing many stories that depend on speed and fast reactions. So why do I keep acting like I am? Schedule Send hasn’t gotten rid of my availability compulsion, not by a long shot. It just lets me push its boundaries a bit, and teach myself the world won’t end.