BERT VERDONCK, lifehacker & life coach

Do you also have to deal with loads of email? Do you need to answer different questions all the time? Do you wish to save time significantly writing emails? Then this lifehack is for you!

This lifehack works exceptionally well if you have patterns in your emails. What is a pattern? A pattern can be any type of question that returns to you on a regular basis, a piece of text that stays the same or a subject that you write about repeatedly. I advise you to go through your last 30 emails and look for patterns in your emails.

Here are some examples of some of my patterns:

*My address : Bert Verdonck, Oude Terelststraat 60, 2650 Edegem, Antwerp, Belgium. Do you really think I feel like typing this over and over again? No!

*My footer : indeed I use different footers, depending on who is getting the mail.

*My definition of lifehacking : when people ask me what lifehacking stands for or what my personal view is, I’ll give them my definition.

*A meeting place : I use more often the same meeting places in different cities, so I’ve prepared those to be instantly included in my emails.

*My 10 tips on how to start living as a lifehacker : I never retype those anymore…

Ok, these simple examples show you already that you can save time everytime you are including these in one of your emails. I use a handy tool, called Texter (PC) to automatically replace them in any text or application on my computer. So, it not only works in Word or emails, also in my browers, virtually anywhere. For Mac there is an alternative : Text Expander

How does it work? You encode your standard piece of text and give it a code. An example is adr + Tab(key). When I type this sequence, it replaces adr automatically with my address as shown above.

Every week I save about 100,000 characters! Assuming that you can type a 100 characters per minute, you can do the math on how much time I am saving…

Having explained that, what your next steps are:
*Download Texter (PC) or Text Expander on Mac

*Install it

*Run it

*Add chuncks of text and create shortcuts for each

*Write some emails, using the shortcuts

If you have a lot of emails to handle in a personalized way, you can still use a lot of these standard text chunks and focus more on the intro and on the outro by adding personal stuff. The receiver of the email will appreciate you more, because you took some time to write a great answer to his request.

Enjoy every day,

Bert Verdonck
Lifehacker