Why I love ‘Send Later’ (and think you should use it too)

Hey 🙂

The villain in all of this, as I see it, is the always-on expectation. The idea that when someone sends you a message, you’re expected to reply immediately. That constant, instant communication is the enemy of great work. It’s the enemy of good culture. I don’t want to work in a place that promotes that, and I don’t want to accidentally promote it myself.

So the way I try to model something different is by defaulting to Send Later.

The time zone thing is a big part of this for me

I’m in the UK. Almost everyone else — team and clients — is in the States. When I sit down at half nine in the morning and start working through stuff I need to communicate, it’s the middle of the night for them. I’m not going to ping people at half four in the morning their time. So I’ll schedule messages to land at 8AM their time, or sometimes I’ll spread them across the day so I’m not bombarding anyone at once.

There’s a judgment call here too. If a team member is traveling and slammed all week, I know exactly which day makes sense to send them something. So I’ll write it now, schedule it for then. That’s the send later function really working — right message, right person, right time.

The reply problem

Here’s something I think about a lot: the more messages you send, the more replies you get. If you don’t want to be in a conversation with someone right now, don’t send the message right now. Schedule it for when you’re actually in a position to receive and respond. This is especially true with instant messaging, where people are primed to reply immediately.

The flip side of this: if I don’t want messages landing in my inbox at 8PM, I shouldn’t be sending messages at 8PM to other people. You’re kind of setting the culture by what you do, not what you say.

I use it everywhere

Google Chat, Slack, email, and yes — iMessage too (iPhone has this built in now). Cara will ask me to remind her to bring something home from work. I’ll schedule a message for the time she asked. Done. I don’t have to remember it, she gets it when it’s useful. Or with Luna’s playdate — I needed to message her friend’s dad, but he’s a teacher and there’s no point sending that at 11AM on a Tuesday. I drafted it and scheduled it for quarter to five when he’d actually be done for the day and could think about it.

What this has to do with culture

If I’m being honest, this is what I actually want everyone in my working world to think about. Because I think lazy communication — firing off half-thought messages expecting a back-and-forth — creates a kind of invisible damage to how a team functions. More messages means more distraction. More distraction means less focus. Less focus means lower quality work. It’s a flywheel, and it quietly grinds things down.

What Send Later forces — at least for me — is that I’m not trying to have a conversation. I’m sending a complete thought. Something that doesn’t necessarily need a reply, or at least not immediately. That’s the discipline underneath the feature: think before you write. Make the message as complete as you can. If you genuinely need to think something through with someone, maybe the right answer is just to get on a call.

High performing teams communicate in a way that protects everyone’s focus. That’s what I’m reaching for here. And something as simple as defaulting to Send Later is, I think, one small way of living that out.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.