Snooze emails and become more productive

Keeping your email inbox organized

Just because email has made communication more accessible, it hasn’t necessarily become more efficient. Responding to the barrage of emails we each get on a daily basis takes time and mental effort. Even the most disciplined and organized among us can spend hours sorting and replying to messages. And these emails get in the way of the most important thing we should be doing: getting our work done.

That’s what Mailbutler is here for: to make sure tools like email remain useful, and don’t become overwhelming. One of the ways Mailbutler is helping you manage your inbox is with the Snooze feature.

What is Snooze and why is it useful?

Snooze is a Mailbutler feature for Apple Mail and Outlook. It allows you to temporarily remove emails from the inbox until you’re ready to respond.

When you press snooze on an email, the message disappears for a certain period of time which you set manually. After this time elapses – be that hours, days, or longer – it shows up as an unread email in your inbox. The feature helps to keep your inbox clear, removing distractions until the messages actually need to be responded to. You can hit snooze on some emails and focus on responding to the messages that are the most pressing – and the others can wait until later.

Snooze is the perfect feature for those of us with busy email inboxes – which, let’s be honest, is most of us. Often, high-traffic email accounts are sorted and labelled by importance. Once its labelled, that message can get lost in a long queue of emails. Hitting snooze is another way to prioritize your conversations without wasting time digging through your inbox or forgetting to respond to a message. In conjunction with our Complete Guide on How to Clean Up Your Inbox, it’s the perfect tool to help you stay productive.

Some jobs tend to bring a particularly high volume of emails on Mondays and Fridays. Snooze allows you to deal with those messages throughout the week with a simple, automated feature that does the work for you. Our feature is designed to help you prioritize and schedule how and when you communicate, so that you can stay productive on other tasks when you need to be.

How does the Mailbutler Snooze feature work?

The feature is incredibly easy to us. A small icon shaped like a crescent moon appears above each of your emails. If you click on this icon, a box will pop up which allows you to set how long the email should snooze for, be that an hour, a day, or longer. Mailbutler provides suggestions for how long to snooze your message, or you can set a custom date and time. (Scroll over the image to zoom in.)

If you want to respond to an email before it is set to reappear? Head to the Mailbutler – Snoozed folder. There you will have access to all of the messages that you snoozed. If you get ahead of schedule, you can unsnooze emails before they resurface on their own, meaning you can work on them again and send them off before time. (Scroll over the image to zoom in.)

Snooze emails to become more productive

We’re sure our users are clever enough to figure out the best way to use the Snooze feature, but there are some strategic ways you can utilise it to get the most out of it. Here are some tips and tricks to really max out Snooze’s productive value:

• Open an email and ask yourself “when do I need to answer this?” Snooze the email until then.
• Reply to short emails in the morning, and snooze longer replies for the afternoon.
• Snooze emails to clear your inbox, then focus on the tasks that matter now.

Using the Snooze button in this way can help relieve your stress about having a full inbox, and means you only receive a response to your reply when you’re ready to deal with it. This means you can focus on what matters and become even more productive!

Finally, if you’re already using the Snooze feature, check out our more detailed, step-by-step instructions in our Snooze support article.