5 Tips for Writing Emails When You’re Short on Time

Subscriber Chad recently took the plunge and signed up for CopyHour (excellent decision—I’m sure he will not regret it).

However…

He now finds himself in a time crunch:

Josh —

Loving CopyHour.

But, my daily email efforts are a mess now.

I’ve got ideas whirling and I’m off message and letting too many typos slip by me and who knows if I’m adding value to my list.

All of this while the day job is wide open.

Keeping the side-gig going and my daily emails meaningful to readers while also trying to learn something new isn’t easy.

Any suggestions?

Ever drop back to 2-3 emails per week during trying seasons?

I hit this too from time to time.

Lately I’ve been traveling a lot more than usual, and that always knocks me out of my normal routine.

Here are a few “survival tips” that help me through busy periods:

– Stick to your schedule, but work on writing faster. Set a specific time of day and length of time that you’re going to write and stick to it. Working to a timer like this will help you stay focused so you get done sooner.

– “Hack” your emails by getting double duty from your personal correspondence. Ever notice how many of my emails are replies to questions I get (like this one)? I get a lot of questions every week, and since I’m going to reply to them anyway, I take a few extra minutes and answer in the form of an email to this list.

– Speaking of questions, answering questions is the fastest and easiest way I know of to write emails. It eliminates all the hmmming and hawing over what to write about today.

– Lower your expectations a bit. If you typically write 500 words, it’s fine to do some quick 200-word emails for a while.

– Finally, you can always recycle emails. Only a quarter of your list will read any given message, so why not pull out something you wrote 6 months ago and send it again? I do this every so often. Since I’ve been writing daily for more than a year and a half now, I have hundreds of emails in my “back catalog.” Hardly anyone ever notices. (Although a few of you do bust me from time to time…)

If you’re still relatively new to writing emails though, don’t give yourself an “easy out” every time life gets a little busy.

Treat recycling as your last option.

Fight tooth and nail to stick to your schedule.

Getting good at writing emails is all about consistency and building good habits.

It does get easier, I promise.

Related posts:

  1. Would Your Emails Survive an ‘Inbox Massacre’? Right now I’m wrapping up this 30-day boost-your-productivity challenge. One of the first assignments was to do a massive “inbox purge”—unsubscribing from all the email lists that aren’t bringing immediate value. I unsubscribed from something like 90-100 lists! Nutso. I highly recommend this exercise. You can think much more clearly...
  2. Why I Don’t Do ‘Autoresponder’ Emails Another question from last week’s multi-email “half-marathon”: Josh – is this email part of a campaign or do you write broadcasts? Also, do you batch write your daily emails? Or write daily? I get this one a LOT, often from subscribers who’d written in with questions and were excited that...
  3. 3 Tips for Smashing Writer’s Block Ever have a project that seems to just drag on and on and on… That’s me right now with this sales page I’m writing. Part of the problem is that I know there’s a lot riding on this project. The sales page is for my business partner John Sonmez’s flagship...
  4. Will Formulaic Emails Put Your Subscribers To Sleep? In the Email Copywriting Workshop I launched last month (which is just wrapping up), student Ram queried: If I keep on repeating the same structure, won’t my mails look very routinized and formulaic over time? Will people trust me with my stories any more? Very valid concern. In the workshop,...