If you spend a significant amount of your day on email, setting up email templates can save you a lot of time and mental bandwidth. This tutorial will walk you through how to easily create email templates in Gmail and how to use, edit, and delete them.
Here are some templates I’ve built as an academic:
1. Response to prospective doc students
2. Mental health resources at my university to pass to students
3. Saying no to a research opportunity gracefully
4. This one is more seasonal, but late add student to dos for each of my classes (depends on how much they missed)
I also have some equivalencies in canvas - things that could be emails but I’ve set up as pages, assignments, or course policies - I only teach grad students so your mileage may vary:
1. Calendly instead of hosting office hours
2. You don’t ever need to ask for an extension of less than 24 hours - I call it an automatic grace period (Don’t email me at 12:03 that you submitted late! I don’t care!)
3. Missed class make-ups (for most class sessions, I allow people to review materials and submit a short reflection on the content to get attendance credit back)
I freaking LOVE these --- and AM so fascinated to see what type of templates work for people in other fields. 👀 I could nerd out all day coming up with template ideas for various roles.
As soon as Josh got home tonight I asked him what templates he has set up and he said "none" and I instantly felt like a mechanic whose partner has 12,000 miles since their last oil change. JOSH. 🤦🏻♀️
This could be a cool community conversation to open either here or during your monthly review days! I too am fascinated by this and have gotten ideas for all of these because of resources you’ve shared in the past 🙌🏻
Here are some templates I’ve built as an academic:
1. Response to prospective doc students
2. Mental health resources at my university to pass to students
3. Saying no to a research opportunity gracefully
4. This one is more seasonal, but late add student to dos for each of my classes (depends on how much they missed)
I also have some equivalencies in canvas - things that could be emails but I’ve set up as pages, assignments, or course policies - I only teach grad students so your mileage may vary:
1. Calendly instead of hosting office hours
2. You don’t ever need to ask for an extension of less than 24 hours - I call it an automatic grace period (Don’t email me at 12:03 that you submitted late! I don’t care!)
3. Missed class make-ups (for most class sessions, I allow people to review materials and submit a short reflection on the content to get attendance credit back)
Omg sorry that’s sooo much longer than I realized 😂 just wanted to offer an example of how to apply this idea in a different field!
I freaking LOVE these --- and AM so fascinated to see what type of templates work for people in other fields. 👀 I could nerd out all day coming up with template ideas for various roles.
As soon as Josh got home tonight I asked him what templates he has set up and he said "none" and I instantly felt like a mechanic whose partner has 12,000 miles since their last oil change. JOSH. 🤦🏻♀️
🤣 Josh!!! Come on!
This could be a cool community conversation to open either here or during your monthly review days! I too am fascinated by this and have gotten ideas for all of these because of resources you’ve shared in the past 🙌🏻
Great idea! For now I've edited my little call to action at the bottom of the post. Maybe we'll get more people to nerd out with us in the comments 🤓