I’m working on my NFT Genesis right now with a fantastic music NFT distributor. Their Content Scheduler and brainstorming queen took a long Christmas break travelling from December 18th to this morning. I’m itching to get on this project and so scheduled a to do list and follow up email a week ago, to arrive in her inbox for 8:45am this morning and guess what – she replied by 10am.
Now, if I had sent my email a week ago, it would be drowning in a pool of post vacation follow up messages. But because it arrived 15 minutes before 9am, (lets call her Sophie for anonymity purposes) Sophie probably saw the message while grabbing her morning coffee or even brushing her teeth. In turn, I’m one of her first follow ups.
Timing is everything. But we all run on a different timeline whether by a literal time zone (GMT to EST) or simply by way of our own personal schedules and brains. You may think about something at 1am but feel it would be inappropriate to send that email in the middle of the night. And so you forget about it and it never gets sent – a great idea wasted or an important task never ticked off. That’s where the Schedule Send button comes in – you can write that email at 1am and schedule it to arrive for 9:00.
In business, this can be crucial. Sure, you want to write that email, text or Microsoft Teams message when it’s convenient for you. But if that’s a bad time for the people on the other end, you risk being ignored or resented. Scheduling is the only alternative.
It does take more thought and a couple more clicks to have your messages delivered later. And you don’t always know the message-reading preferences of your cycling buddies or co-workers. But often, you do have a sense of when friends, family members and business associates are likely to be receptive to your messages. It is good for you, and it’s more considerate to them.
The social norms of digital communications have not caught up with the reality that messages find you at all times and places — when you’re walking in the woods or putting your baby to bed. You can either remind yourself to deal with that text or email later, or respond immediately and pull yourself away from what you’re doing.
That’s a responsibility on you to silence your phone notifications at baby’s bedtime or remember to respond to your night-owl boss the next day. We can shift the balance so both message senders and recipients share in building healthy digital boundaries.
The schedule feature, luckily, is available on most popular email platforms including Gmail, Outlook, Apple, Slack and even iMessage.
