I’ve been using email for many years, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started making serious use of draft emails. If you’ve completely ignored that save as draft feature in your email client, here’s a few ideas that will help change all that.

1. Cooling Off Period

   Use email long enough and eventually you’ll get one that just pushes your button. In the heat of the moment it’s easy to respond in haste (flame on!). I’ve even seen some people get so worked up about an email that they’ll spend the next hour composing a small book as a reply to vent their frustrations. If you catch yourself in this mode save the email as a draft. Go take a walk outside and then review what you wrote. You may find that a few edits are in order before finally sending it, or you may find that you don’t need to send a reply at all.

2. Task List / Status Update Reply

   Working on different projects I occasionally get emails that are basically a to do list, or a status update on several issues. It isn’t very often that I’ll have all the details I need to know for the reply immediately, so I’ll start a reply with the information that I do have, then dig up the rest during the next hour. Sometimes this can be more involved and might take me a whole day or more to finish. By saving the reply as a draft it’s easy for me to come back at different points during the day to add new details.

3. The Weekly Report

   A couple of years ago I started using draft emails for a weekly update. I’m sure there are some people that are cringing at the thought of doing this and I would have been right there with you at one point, but no more. On Monday morning I send out the email for the previous week and start a new draft email that I update through out the whole week. I start a new section of the email for each work day and keep the formatting pretty loose. Well, except for the subject line. I keep the exact same format for the subject line each week:

   Status Report: YYYY-MM-DD -> YYYY-MM-DD

   The first date is the start of the week, the second day is the last day of the week. I do this for two reasons. One, I CC myself on all of these emails and keep them in one folder to make it easy to go back and quickly find a report for a given week. The second reason is to make it easy for the other people in my group who get these emails to filter it.

   I don’t have any hard and fast rules about the contents of these emails, so sometimes they can seem rather random. I generally don’t include every little thing I did, instead I try to include things that I think would be useful if I had to remember it a month from now. So this will include things like when I took a vacation or sick day, contact information for a vendor or a big ugly SQL query that took me awhile to figure out.

   Then there are the more obvious items, like so and so reports a problem with xyz and John Doe said he’d take care of it. Those are handy because if I’m asked about it a week or two later I don’t always remember the details, but I usually remember that I included it in a weekly status report. At this point I’ve been doing it for so long that even if I don’t remember putting in a status report email I look there any way because I know that is where I dump details during the week.

   Then there are the general ‘things I did this week’ that are also included. This is helpful when the boss wants to know what you’ve been up to.

Out of all of these I find number 3 the most useful, since I use it every week. Number 2 I use occasionally and I’ve mellowed out enough that I don’t have to use number 1 too often.

Seriously though, even if no one else reads my weekly status reports, they’ve been a huge help to me. Now that most email clients have a reasonable built in search feature it makes it pretty painless to go look up history on old items. If you don’t have current method for keeping track of the information that floods in every day, start a draft email and fill it up as the week goes on.