💡Top tip of the day!🪄
Did you know that you can delay e-mails and messages in Outlook? Perhaps you’ve used the possibility to delay or schedule sending email messages?
✨With Viva Insight Service Plan it is even easier!
My colleague Lesley (check out her Viva Visionary blog here) and I work in different time zones. We are communicating via Teams, so this way we can both collaborate and communicate off-synch, and it works perfectly. 😀👍🏽
If Lesley was a customer or vendor, and we don’t have a shared team in Teams, I might want to send her an e-mail. However, I might be writing my e-mail at 5 AM in the morning, or at 10 PM at night, as this time worked for me. Still, even though Lesley most likely has set her ❗alerts and notifications to 🔖not disturb if outside normal ⏰work hours, it can be a good idea to delay sending the e-mail so it arrives at least within her normal working hours.
🙆🏽♀️In any case, I have written the e-mail, so it’s out of my hair and I can go an do something else on my To-Do list (I hope you too have discovered Microsoft To-Do by the way).🎉
Using the Viva Insight Add-in in Outlook the e-mail will automagically be delayed until her next work day.
How to delay sending e-mails
When you start a new e-mail in Outlook you might not see any Viva Insight Add-in, and it may look like this:
Click the 3 dots in the top right corner (ellipse), then choose “Viva Insights” under “Add-in” and you will see a menu for the email. If you haven’t written any name in the “To” field, you’ll get this type of menu:
Add recipient
Write the name of the person in the “To”-field and then click the 3 dots in the top right corner, and some magic will happen…well, yes, it is a little bit of magic! Click “Viva Insight” in the Add-in menu and very soon you’ll see a line pops up above the “To”-field.
Schedule time for email-arrival
As you see in this example, the e-mail will be send on Monday, February 28th, even though I am sending this on a Friday. The reason for this is that we have meeting-free Fridays in CloudWay, and in Viva Insights we have set work days to Monday-Thursday, hence, not to be disturbed on Fridays (unless we want to be disturbed 😉).
⌛In the delay sentence I can even schedule the time the e-mail should be sent. Click the “Schedule send|Feedback” link, and you can schedule for when the e-mail will be sent out.
Good luck and enjoy gettings things done!😀✨✔️
Read more about Delay delivery plan here!
💡What if there is a better way?
Delay sending email might work for me, still, what if the email, that I am writing late at night, could be useful for my colleague, especially if she reads it before her workshop at 08:30 AM tomorrow morning?
If I delay sending my email, she most likely won’t see it before after her workshop, as it arrives in her mailbox perhaps just as she is starting her workshop. If I don’t delay sending the email, she could read it at 7 AM, as she is a morning person and always go through her mailbox first thing when she starts working at 6:30 AM.
This way she gets the information early, and as she had customized her notifications settings to not be disturbed after 7 PM, she wasn’t disturbed by me sending it late in the evening either.
Could it be a post in Teams instead?
There are situations where it is useful to delay sending, e.g. all company email that needs to be sent out at a certain time. However, even if it is possible, think twice if you should do it, and ask yourself; could this instead be a post or a reply to a post in Teams instead?
Check out my colleague @Ståle Hansen‘s video at YouTube about Digital Wellbeing and you might learn more about controlling your notifications.