This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email management service I’ve now used for years. For this post, I’d like to focus on one SaneBox feature, deferring email.

Deferring email is the process of taking something in your inbox and snoozing it for a set period of time. This gets the email out of your life and lets you focus on other things until some time in the future when you’re in a better place to process that mail.

When I first heard of the idea of deferring email, I thought it was silly and just another way of pushing today’s problems until tomorrow. However, I was wrong. Deferring email is actually a very powerful tool that takes almost no time and I’ve now been using it for years. I get a lot of email that doesn’t merit getting sorted into my task system (which takes time) but also isn’t appropriate for right now. Deferring that email just takes a second and there is something to be said for getting that mail out of the way while you continue doing the hard work.

With SaneBox, you have nearly unlimited options for deferring email. You can defer it to tomorrow, or next week, or Saturday morning, or a specific time. For today, I thought it’d be fun to share my deferred email boxes on my MacSparky email account.

AFTERNOON

This is the nutty one that will make a lot of people angry. I do a thorough sweep through my MacSparky account every morning and afternoon. Morning is when I am most productive so I don’t deal with many emails directly in that morning sweep. Pushing email away until the afternoon review by deferring it is a great way to keep myself from getting sidetracked by non-critical email. I’ve thought about getting rid of this deferred email box several times but I don’t. It is just too useful.

TOMORROW, 2 DAYS, 5 DAYS

I only give a certain amount of time to email every day. I always deal with the most critical email first either answering it directly or turning its response into an OmniFocus project. If there is still email left and time’s up, I defer the email out into the future.

Deferring non-critical email is a great solution, and it’s just one of the many features available to you with a SaneBox subscription. Best of all, use the links in this post to get a discount.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Ulysses, The app where I do so much writing on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. In the last year, my usage of Ulysses has only increased more. It has become for me, “the place for words”. Not only do I keep a repository of text, I call it the “text bank” that I use in my law practice in Ulysses, it has also become the place I keep notes, work on drafts, outline screencasts, plan podcasts, and write just about all the other words I make in one context or another. I love the clean design and the way it syncs everything everywhere.

The Ulysses team just keeps making the app better. Just this week, they released a new update for iOS and iPad that adds a ton of power features, including mouse and trackpad support, external folder support, and several more new features. Writing is hard. Ulysses helps you out by removing distractions and letting you focus on moving that cursor from left to right. Moreover, with seamless integration between all of my Apple devices, I can add and edit my words on everything from my 27” iMac to my iPhone in my pocket. Best of all, if you sign up with the links in this blog post, you’ll get three months of Ulysses for free.