Welcome to Day 12! We're now more than halfway to the finish line, so congratulations on making it this far.

The next few days are going to focus on writing email. Today, let's talk about a tactic that can save you a lot of time: using templates. If you set them up, you'll be able to write a message once, but send it over and over, whenever you need it.

If you repeatedly send out messages that have the same content, you'll find that using your mail provider's template feature works a lot more smoothly and results in a lot less mistakes than using copy-and-paste. Even if you don't send many messages with the same text, you'll probably find it helpful to have a couple prewritten messages just a click or two away. Some good candidates are messages that are especially difficult to write, like declining an invitation.

Your mission today is to create a solid set of templates so that you never have to retype the same response again. Here are client-by-client instructions for setting up the templates.

Final Thoughts

Templates can save you time (if you regularly send similar messages) and willpower (a prewritten response makes hard decisions easier to communicate). They can also increase the quality of the messages you send - for example, we've been improving our template responses for common support issues for months. Every user who receives one of these templates receives a much higher quality answer than if we had written the answer from scratch each time.

Templates are a fantastic solution for a surprisingly high percentage of messages, but we'll still need to write custom responses most of the time. Tomorrow, we'll talk about some ways to make sure the messages we send are as usable as possible.