Schedule a ‘just checking up’ email to yourself — productivity tip

“Why the office is dead. Remote work is the future”
– Every Joe and Jane on LinkedIn bolstering their personal brand

Meanwhile, real humans are struggling to stay productive and focus while working remotely.

So here’s a quick productivity tip which I hadn’t come across before.

Let’s get straight into the tip, followed by some bloggy diatribe.

Step 1. Schedule a recurring calendar reminder for Monday mornings to set your goals for the week.

(Nothing new yet…)

Repeat until: FOREVER (ever, ever, ever…)

Add an email reminder so it shows up in your inbox:

Consider adding a pop-up notification too, for your iPhone, Android or Pager device

Zero inbox is knocking... click on it, you know you want to!

In my recurring task description, I also added a link to my task management tool — Notion (check it out if you haven’t yet).

Step 2. When your reminder shows up, write out your tasks as a reply

This is your ‘just checking up’ email, which will get sent to you later on.

Make sure you add all the stylish trimmings you’d expect from your boss

Step 3. Schedule send

This is the magic part. Use Schedule send to have this email arrive in your inbox at a later date.

As you can see, I use gmail. If you use a different email client, let’s hope you have the same functionality, otherwise your virtual assistant is going to get real sick of you.

It’s like all the great bits of email, plus the slow, have-they-lost-my-package ploddings of snail mail

Customise your scheduled send

You might want to tweak the timing to suit your preferences. Some examples: you could schedule it to be sent that afternoon, the next morning, Wednesday midday, or for Friday morning.

Choose a time far enough away to be able to tick a few things off, but soon enough to keep the heat on.

Step 4. Receive your check-up email, and respond with adjustments

Maybe something popped up and blindsided you, and you genuinely need to drop some tasks or replace them.

I use the strike-through to indicate a completed task.

No worries. Here you’ll pen your follow-up email to be sent again the following day (or whenever your schedule dictates).

Then use the same Schedule send feature to fire it off into the future.

So there you have it.

This method works well for me when I’m working solo, or in a more autonomously oriented team. Using email is admittedly pretty 90s, but (for some reason) we’re still addicted to checking it up to 2.5 hours a day, and while we’re still stuck in this technological purgatory, we might as well use our weakness to our own advantage.

This concept seeks to keep us on task, in a similar way that using a task timer does, but it also challenges us to zoom out and ensure the task you’re working on actually fits into higher level goals. Think efficiency vs effectiveness.

Compared to using a task list or kanban board that you can update or adjust, the check-up-email method bottles your intentions at a particular time to reflect on at a later date. When Monday’s check-up email comes in on Wednesday, you are staring at what your intentions were back then, and think…

“Oh yeah, I did want to achieve that this week”.

Then you have the option to judge whether your deviation was justified, or whether something shiny just grabbed your attention and your original goal is actually a higher priority. With a task list, you can adjust it based on the shiny things, but your original intentions are easily lost.

Of course, many people don’t need to imagine a boss to breathe down their neck, but there will be times when either your boss is ineffective or is too flat out to provide enough attention, leaving you to manage yourself.

Hope you give it a go.

Yeah, so I’m gonna need…