Email hack from Eva Chen: Save custom signatures for common replies

Head
of Fashion at Instagram Eva Chen attends the Proenza Schouler
fashion show during New York Fashion Week on September 12, 2016
in New York City.
JP Yim/Getty
Images

• Responding personally to every email you get at work can
  consume valuable time.
• Instagram executive Eva Chen noticed most of her emails
  concerned the same 10 topics, so she came up with a clever
  workaround.
• Instead of typing a response to each email she gets, she
  keeps stock responses saved as email signatures so she can
  quickly fire back a message.

It’s estimated that the average worker receives
almost 90 emails a day.

Responding to all those messages could eat up valuable hours of
the workday — but one executive has a clever solution she uses on
a daily basis.

Eva Chen, the head of fashion partnerships at Instagram, told
Indya Brown at
The Cut that she keeps a stockpile of generic email responses
saved as customized signatures. 

“Think about the emails you send in any given day. You’re
probably responding to the same ten topics,” Chen told The
Cut.
“For example, someone will invite me to an
event and I’ll be out of town, so my response is, ‘I’m sorry, I
can’t make it. I’m out of town.'” 

“Instead of typing that out, I have it saved as a
signature. So basically I have ten signatures saved on my email
like, ‘Sorry I’m out of town I can’t make it,’ ‘I’ll be there,’
‘CCing my admin to set up a meeting,’ etc. It makes a big
difference.”

Chen’s email hack is reminiscent of Google’s
Smart Reply feature, which allows Gmail users to instantly
respond to emails with short, auto-generated replies like “See
you there” or “Sounds good.” The feature debuted in 2015 and was
released widely in a Gmail update earlier this year.

Microsoft
rolled out a similar feature for Outlook, its webmail
service, in August.