Tech tip of the day: Add a two minute delay to sending emails

This is a great tech tip from the Harvard Business Review blog that most of us should probably implement. It involves programming your email account to wait two minutes before each message is sent. It's a great fail safe measure to prevent those emails we regret as soon as they're sent and the typos (and omitted attachments) we don't catch until it's too late. HBR's columnist Katie Smith Milway provides instructions for both Outlook and Gmail users (the former is a bit more complicated than Google's "undo send" feature which is described here). 

As Ms. Milway points out, the downside to changing your email settings to interpose a mandatory delay is that there are times when it can be quite frustrating to not be able to circulate documents or participate in email discussions in real time. But given the potential disasters - including ones that can end a career - averted by automatically delaying the sending of emails written in haste, dealing with occasional frustration seems like a pretty good trade-off.

Check out Ms. Milway's email tech tips here at the HBR blog.

(jbl).