Send Email Without the Worry: Training Your Autopilot

Work is filled with moments where our minds drift off on vacation, leaving the body carelessly going through the motions in autopilot mode.  Nowhere are the consequences of a poorly-trained autopilot more damaging than in email.   Mess up an experiment, you can repeat it.  Send an angry email to your boss, you can start browsing the classifieds.

Fortunately, we can incorporate a few systems into our email rituals to protect us from ourselves.  So get your autopilot’s attention and let’s start training.

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The Premature Send Email

Send 14 emails per day and we’re logging nearly 100 emails every week.  It’s no wonder the mouse hand is so well-trained to roll over the “Send email” button and click.  Ninety-eight percent of the time, we call it efficient.  The other 2%, we call it a nightmare.

The nanosecond after mistakenly clicking the Send Email button, our body goes into instant panic “OH S**T!! OH S**T!! OH S**T!!”  After changing pants, we’re left to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes, a Premature Email Send situations can be resolved with:

(oops! Clicked ‘send email’ prematurely…)

– followed by the rest of the email.

But other times, we’re in the middle of crafting and editing a message, which may contain content we were going to remove before sending.  Maybe the email makes us look unprofessional.  Maybe it makes us look like a jerk.

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The Solution:

One of the easiest ways to prevent the premature email send is to temporarily move the “Send to” email address into the main body of the email, leaving the actual “Send to” field blank.

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Bingo.  Any premature “Send email” attempts will be foiled and the momentary panic will be followed by a celebration instead of a Depends ad.

When the email is properly composed and you’re ready to send, simply cut and paste the address into the “To:” field and fire it off.

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The Angry Send Email

“Here’s my draft of the grant.  It’s pretty rough, but what do you expect when you gave me a whole 24 hours notice of the deadline?!  Are you kidding me?!  Let me just be clear that if this ever happens again, I’m done.  If you think I won’t find another lab to work in, you’re crazy.”

No need to go into the merit of this message (we’ve all been there…), but a few deep breaths and a brisk walk would probably do this author some good.  While some emails are blatantly negative, many fall into the grey area between complaining, passive aggression and humor – leaving the recipient to guess at the true intent of the words on the page.  These are dangerous.  Nothing good ever comes of miscommunication in an email, unless you enjoy dealing with unnecessary problems and unintended fallout- then you’ll love miscommunication.

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The Solution:

What if you had a plug-in that worked like a spell-check but checked your message tone instead?  Meet ToneCheck.  The email plug-in not only flags emotionally charged sentences, it also helps you edit the tone appropriately and will even prevent emails from being sent which fall outside of your acceptable “tone tolerance.”  ToneCheck is currently only available for Microsoft Outlook, but you can sign up to be notified when a plug-in for your email client is developed (Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Gmail, Thunderbird).

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The OOPS Send Text

These days the line between email and text communication is certainly blurred.  But who could say if a text could be as damaging as an email? Actually, an endless list of celebrities and athletes can.

But what if you’re not part of an illicit affair – maybe you just want to ask a friend how their job interview went (the covert one they went on while their boss thought they were at the dentist).  Or maybe you want to ask if the surprise party is still on for this weekend.  A lingering text could potentially be seen by anyone, so best to eliminate the evidence sooner than later.

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The Solution:

TigerText, the electronic version of “this message will self-destruct in 60 seconds”, is an application that allows users to set a lifetime for their texts.  The app, available for Blackberry, iPhone and Android, erases messages from both parties’ phones upon reading or after a set length of time.  It’s an easy way to make sure your PI, or the National Enquirer, stays out of your business…

While TigerText claims to be named after the animal, which is notoriously difficult to track, it’s hard to ignore the coincidence of a text-erasing application of the same name as a famous athlete who probably wishes he had this product…

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So next time your brain checks out for a beach vacation in the middle of responding to emails, rest assured that your autopilot is up to the job.

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Check out the other articles in the Training Your Autopilot series:

Mastering Mindless Tasks

Assay Pipetting

When in Doubt, Throw it Out

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