7 Reasons to Use Delay Delivery for Your Outgoing Email

Here’s an idea to make you more effective as a leader, influencer and communicator.

In business life, timing is important. The best time to deliver an email isn’t always when you’re ready to press send. Using Delay Delivery allows you to schedule your outgoing email for when they’re most likely to have maximum impact and allow you to get a quality reply.

Many senior executives have days full of back-to-back meetings and phone conversations, meaning that email builds up during the day and is usually only addressed ‘after hours’. In fact, of all tasks, email is the one most likely to be done ‘after hours’.

As a result, the work day gets extended and often includes working on weekends. It seems this has become accepted, not just during times of high volumes but as an everyday expectation for some people and some roles. It has become the norm for checking and quick responding to email to continue from the work day to ‘after hours’ even if the sender is only intending to clear their inbox and not expecting an ‘after hours’ response.

But it means busy executives seldom feel disconnected from their work and this lack of real downtime adds to feelings of stress and contributes to ‘executive burnout’. This blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure time are less of an issue for younger executives, but may aggravate work/life conflicts for older generations who may have family responsibilities.

Some think that addressing email ‘after hours’ helps to reduce a sense of overload that comes from a build of email during the day. However, as this strategy has evolved as a way of keeping on top of one’s work, many report that they continue to feel overloaded and under stress.

Those who don’t respond to email ‘after hours’ require either a high degree of self-control or a mind-set of active resistance.

The latest research by the Kingston Business School into ‘Strategies for Effectively Managing Email at Work’ lists 10 learning points – four for individuals and six for organisations. The #3 of these strategies recommends using a Delay Send function when emailing out of hours.

While I agree with the principle, I think this should be called Delay Delivery (rather than send) – it is fine for you to write a message and send it ‘after hours’, just control when that message is actually delivered.

And I suggest that controlling when our messages are delivered is a great strategy for all emails that we write, not just those written ‘after hours’.

Click here to purchase the full White Paper of the 7 Reasons to Use Delay Delivery for Your Outgoing Email.