An Outlook Rule for Speed Walkers
Email is fast, convenient, and asynchronous, all of which make it a wonderful means of communication. Email is also impersonal, lacking context and verbal and non-verbal cues, making it a sometimes surprisingly poor means of communication.
The downsides of email are exasperated by one of its strengths, speed. When you write an email you have the situation in your mind, as well as your intent and that is not always what makes it onto the screen. To mitigate the risk of problematic emails, the best approach is intentionality, or phrased more crudely, to think twice before you say something.
I’ve noticed that the time you think most clearly about something stupid that you just said is right after you say it, so I’ve been using a rule in Outlook that holds items in my outbox for a minute after I click send.
Not really the stuff of legends, but since it is not obvious how to do this in Outlook 2007, here’s how to set up a rule like this:
- Go to Tools -> Rules and Alerts
- Click “New Rule”
- Step 1: Select “Check messages after sending”
- Step 1: Don’t select any conditions, and click “Next”
- Step 1: Select “defer delivery by a number of minutes”
- Click on the “a number of” minutes hyperlink and select 1
- “Next” twice
- Name your rule and your done
One caveat for this rule; you can really confuse someone by sending an email, walking over to their desk, commenting on how you’ve been practicing speed walking and then watching your email arrive in their inbox as you stand there.