Crush Your Inbox! – How To Use Email Templates Painlessly

I’ve decided to call this email management series “Crush Your Inbox!” since it fits the spirit of what I’m trying to teach you to accomplish. So let’s get crushing.

Rework is the opposite of leverage. And yet it likely domnates your email if you ever send out messages that are similar to each other. How many times have you had to give multiple people the same (or 90% similar) response? If you’re going to be savvy, the answer had better be “never again.” To beat your inbox into heady submission requires the generous use of templates. Write them once, save them, use them over and over again.

Templates are like the hired goons in the “Crush Your Inbox” universe. They don’t think for themselves, they’re easily replaceable, but they’re effective nonetheless at keeping you focused on creating new results rather than rehashing old ones.

But … few people ever use them. Why? Probably because:

• People are in such a rush to churn through email that they don’t think about it (”It’s easier just to send this now …”), or
• They don’t know how to create the templates in the first place.

Make Template-Hunting Painless
Part of the Leverage Mindset is to make things as easy as possible to implement. So I’m going to lay out two simple things you can do to make integrating the use of templates in your inbox as painless as possible. In reality, making the templates is mind-bogglingly easy … it’s getting around to making them that eludes the average person.

So let’s make sure you get to creating these templates. First of all, you need to make sure that you never lose track of what emails you know/suspect you’ll be revisiting in the future. Anything from generic responses to information, periodic announcements, welcome emails for new customers, etc. … these all need templates assigned to them. But they don’t need them right now. They just need to be flagged.

So do this: Create a folder/label in your email client with a catchy name such as MAKE_TEMPLATE. Now moving forward, any time you write an email and say, “Dang, I sure wish I had a template for this,” blind carbon-copy (BCC) yourself on the response so you’ll receive a copy of the email you just sent. When it arrives, toss it in the MAKE_TEMPLATES folder and forget about it for now.

Later, when you have some downtime or you’re holding on the phone, you can open this folder and knock out the simple process of creating your templates. And since you’ve BCC’d yourself on the email you’ll already have the response written, so it’s really just a matter of cut/paste/tweak and you’re done. How’s that for painless?

Make Template-Creating Painless
If you don’t know how to create templates in the first place, don’t worry, it’s not difficult at all. Just ask Google. Or, if you’re lazy, just click the name of your email client below:

Gmail Yahoo Mail Thunderbird Outlook Opera Mail

So, Get To It Already!
What are you waiting for? It will take you all of 30 seconds to set up your MAKE_TEMPLATES folder/label, so go ahead and do it now, before you click another thing on that computer of yours. Go, and do it now. You’ll thank yourself for it.

(PS – Please leave a comment if you’ve got any questions OR you have something great to add to the conversation …)