Schedule your email to send at the right time

When an email goes out is part of the message, just as much as its text — and hardly anyone realizes it. An email written on a Saturday evening or late at night can give the recipient the impression that you're always in work mode, even though you just wrote it in a quiet moment that happened to suit you. Scheduled sending lets you work whenever it suits you without others reading it as a signal of constant availability.

A typical scenario

Petra, the director of a small company, has a habit of catching up on email on Sunday evenings, when she finally has time to sit down and answer them calmly. The problem is that her team gradually got used to "the boss writes on weekends too" — and started feeling guilty when they didn't respond the same way. Some employees even started replying to her on Sundays, even though they'd rather have had the peace and quiet.

Petra now writes emails whenever she wants, but schedules them to send Monday morning. The team gets messages during business hours, as if they'd been written then — and nobody feels pressured to respond outside their own time.

How to do it

1. Write the message as usual, whenever it suits you — scheduling it to send later doesn't restrict when you write it.
2. Instead of the regular Send button, click the arrow next to the Send button and choose Schedule send.
3. Gmail offers a few common times, like tomorrow morning or Monday morning, or set a custom date and time exactly as needed.
4. Until then, the scheduled message sits in a special Scheduled folder, where you can edit or cancel it anytime before it goes out.
5. At the set time, Gmail sends the message automatically, whether or not you're at your computer.
6. A scheduled message can be edited right up until the moment it sends — if something changes in the meantime, open it in the Scheduled folder, edit it, and reschedule or send it right away.
7. The same principle works for replies within an existing conversation too, not just new messages — even a reply in an ongoing thread can be scheduled for a later, more appropriate time.

The best tools

• Gmail's built-in scheduled send — free, works directly in the interface with no extension, more than enough for typical use.
• Scheduled send in Outlook — a similar feature for Microsoft 365 users, same principle.
• Boomerang for Gmail — a browser extension with more advanced scheduling, including reminders if nobody replies to a sent message by a chosen deadline.
• Scheduled messages in chat tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams) — the same principle applies outside of email too, for messages to coworkers outside their working hours.

What you get out of it

• A better impression on the recipient: a message delivered at a reasonable working hour comes across as more considered than one sent at three in the morning.
• A healthier company culture: when leaders don't send emails outside working hours, the team doesn't feel pressured to reply outside of them either.
• Your own flexibility without changing the outward signal: you can work whenever suits you, without others reading it as an expectation of constant availability.
• Lower risk of a hasty message: the gap between writing and sending is also a chance to read the message once more before it actually goes out.
• A consistent outward signal: even if you work irregular hours, your outward communication looks like it comes from a fixed schedule.

Pro tip

If you write emails in the evening, schedule them straight for the next morning — you won't be training people to expect you're available late at night, and you won't waste time remembering to send the email manually in the morning either.