Using "Delayed Send" for E-mails in MS Outlook and Gmail

Alright, hi everybody, hope you're doing well. This is Randy Dean, and I want to share with you a quick video tip today about where you can find delayed send in both Outlook and Gmail. Once again, my name is Randy Dean. I'm considered the email sanity expert. I speak on these topics all around the United States, Canada, and Europe multiple times per year. It's been a bit of a fun and long summer, and I haven't made too many new YouTube video tips. And so what I'd like to do is maybe start doing something a little bit different this year now that the kids are back in school, which is to give quick little short tips on one specific thing. And I think I'd like to add these to some of the longer video tips that I've made in the past. So hopefully you'll like this change. Definitely leave me some comments below at the end and let me know if you like this new format. So let's go in and take a look. First thing about delayed send, why do you even do this thing called delayed send? And what I will tell you is basically the way that delayed send works is there's a couple of key reasons that you can use it. I'm sure there's a few others that you can think of. The one is just to time it so that the message will be received by the recipient at a time when they're going to be more likely to pay attention to the message. You know, one of the things I learned many years ago when I was doing marketing and promotions is that, you know, never make a client communication if it's business to business on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. So let's say you have this great idea for a promotional email to go out to somebody in your contact database, you could craft it Monday morning, but then you could do a delayed send so it's sent Tuesday morning or even Tuesday early afternoon when there's more of a chance that you can see it better. Uh, the other reason that you would do this is just to set appropriate expectations. Let's say your boss sends you an email at 11:30 at night, and for some crazy reason you're checking your email, you draft your response, don't you you don't dare hit send right now. What you want to do is instead do a delayed send so it arrives at the boss's desk at 8:15 in the morning so he thinks that you're a normal human being with normal respectable limitations to your availability. So, so how do you do it? It's actually really easy. All you have to do in Microsoft Outlook is just come up here, hit New Email, and when you come up to New Email, you'll see it'll give you the standard options here. But what you can do is come up here under the Options tab at the top And if you take a look up here, there's several little things. One of them is delayed delivery. And so what you want to do is click open delayed delivery. And as you can take a look, it gives you some different options. You can change importance level and you can set the sensitivity. You know, so some, some different tools are in here. Here's where you have the voting buttons. You could almost do like a little mini survey here. But right down here is the delivery options. Right here is where it is. Do not deliver before this date, this time. And so what you can do is you can actually set the date, set the time, And, uh, you— the way it used to work in Outlook, uh, was that in order for this to work, you'd have to have your computer on. If you didn't have your computer on, it wouldn't send until the next time you turned your computer on that was past that date and time. But if I'm not mistaken, I believe on the newer systems now with the Office 365 Exchange Server, pretty sure that when you set these up now, they will still send even if your computer is not on, just as long as the message is on the server and ready to be queued. So you can test that on your system, see how it works. I always say the best way to do this is just send one to yourself. And so let's do this. Do not deliver before, uh, right now I'm going to say tomorrow at— and let's move this up here to 11 AM— and I'm going to hit close. All right, and then what I'm going to do is just come up here and put myself, Randy at Randall Dean, testing delayed, send. All right. And so I've got this set up. I'm just going to hit send. And now what's going to happen is it's going to be sent hopefully tomorrow at that time. Now let's jump over here to Gmail. So I'm going to jump into my Gmail here real quick. And very similar capability. Hit your compose button to open up a new email. Now, one thing I've learned about this, notice this, that it's— see this little dropdown arrow down here? Click on the dropdown arrow. There's schedule send. But watch what happens if you try to schedule send before you've set up your message. Error: please specify at least one recipient. So I'll hit OK. What I have to do is I have to put somebody up here, randy@randaldean.com. Subject: Testing delayed. Send. And then I'm going to come down here. Now that I have this, I'm going to schedule send. And notice I can do tomorrow morning at a set time, tomorrow afternoon at a set time, or I can pick the date and time. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to say tomorrow at— and let's make this 11:46 AM, and I'm going to hit schedule send. And now it's scheduling the send. So it really is that easy. It's a really powerful tool. It can allow you to manage these things. One thing, uh, I believe that these messages will be in your drafts folder until they're sent, although notice right here in Gmail they've actually got a special little folder for scheduled. So you can go here and let's say you need to change something in the message, you could still go in here and do some editing or even delete the message and start it over again if there was something in that message that you didn't like. So like I said, quick short tip this month. Let's go ahead and finish this thing up. Uh, what I'd like to do is say thank you for your time and watching today's video. I'm going to try to create more of these now. Like I said, I got the kiddos back to school, and so hopefully I can start adding to my catalog of items here on YouTube. If you'd like to find out a little bit more about me and my programs, uh, please go visit my primary website, randaldean.com. Uh, of course, if you like the video, please subscribe. I'll be posting more for Outlook and Gmail and on some related and other topics too. And if you're interested, I even have a whole series of productivity PDF tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Gmail usage, smartphone tablet usage, and other related topics. So if you'd like to get something like that, just send me an email to Randy@randaldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, send that over to me, and I'll send you out a whole catalog of of electronic PDFs, some of which link through to some of my other YouTube videos that you can use and share to help improve your productivity and performance. Thanks a lot. Hope you had fun.