OPTED Magazine

Remember when you were a kid and Mom set you down with a stack of thank you cards after the holidays and you dutifully filled out cards to family and friends, thanking them for their gifts?  To expedite the process, I bet many of your cards included the same phrases, substituting a couple specifics to personalize the message.  This exercise of a canned response or template for messages that you send out repeatedly is an often unexplored tactic to improve productivity.

My friend in the tech industry works for a company that responds to thousands of sales requests a week and for the first five years of the company’s existance, they filled out these 20-25 page documents individually each time.  An easy fix was their creation of a master template that included all the graphs, data and company information that changed only once quarterly.  Lo and behold, efficiency and productivity skyrocketed allowing the company to increase their sales and respond to requests in a timely fashion.

One aspect of our work and personal life that could benefit from a canned response is email.  In one way or another, we have batches of email entering our inbox that require nothing more than an acknowledgement that we received it, or messages we need to reply to that ask us for instructions that never change.  Rather than dig through the “sent” box, a system of canned responses we can rely on that are close at hand make email productivity a reality.

If you are a Gmail user, here are two ways to utilize canned responses:

1. Canned response feature in labs — Gmail created a labs feature called canned response, where you can combine your filters with canned response messages, or when an email comes in and you have an email response you’ve already written that suffices for your reply, with a click of a button you’ve dealt with the email.  To learn more about the feature, check out the instructions.
2. Quick Links — another Gmail labs feature is Quick Links, which inserts a box on the left hand side of your window where you bookmark important messages you’ve written or received that can be clicked on for easy access.  One way I’ve used this feature is for my email signature.  I filter a number of email accounts through my Gmail and when I respond to work emails or personal emails, I need a different contact signature on the bottom.  So, I sent an email to myself listing all my different email signatures and bookmarked it with Quick Links.  Whenever I need an email signature, I cut and paste the text into the bottom of my message.

Of course, there are a number of situations in life where canned responses are NOT appropriate (in fact, many relate to your boss at work who would not be happy receiving canned responses to all their messages!)  But canned responses are a common sense solution to increasing productivity.

Have you implemented a canned response strategy?  Share your ideas in the comments!

If you liked this post, you might like::

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3. Sources of lost productivity in the workplace
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5. How to develop a system for greeting cards