Saving Time with Email Templates

Given my prior post on designing a communication system for your classes, let's talk about another way to make your overall communication system more efficient: email templates. An email template is a blurb of text in an easily accessible place that you can reuse in its entirety or tweak a few spots before sending. The goal of email templates is to speed up email writing, keep the tone and style I prefer, and ensure they include all necessary information.

[This article is also posted on medium.]

Why Keep Email Templates

Beyond efficiency, the main reason for email templates is to better align your communications (or the communications that reflect on you, like those from your teaching team) with the values you care about, even when you are stressed or short on time. Writing an email I know I'll reuse when I'm relaxed and thoughtful means I can still respond well when I'm frazzled, cranky, or pressed for time. I have lost count of how many emails I've had to write in a less-than-ideal state, and while LLMs help, they still take longer than a handy email template. And sometimes writing the email later is not an option because the world keeps turning, deadlines are coming, or I need to work on the email mountain before it grows worse.

Email templates are also very useful for teaching teams because they create a communication baseline. Giving them templates with clear permission to use them shows your teaching team how you want them to respond to students and provides exemplars of the tone and style they should use when communicating with students. The teaching team doesn't have to use them, but they're useful when a team member is just starting out and hasn't found their voice yet.

Template Life Cycle

Generally, I've found templates to go through five "life" phases.

Deciding to make a template. The first step is to decide to create one, of course. The primary signal that you need one is when you find yourself repeating yourself, and you are reasonably confident you'll keep repeating yourself. I have a relatively low bar for this because the cost of having the text in my template file is very low, so if I'm pretty sure I'll have to write the same text two or more times, I'll copy it in.

Decide where to put it. The best advice I've ever heard when deciding where to put something is to ask yourself, "If I were looking for this right now, where would I look first?" And what comes to mind is where you put it. I keep templates in a personal Google Doc, course-specific template Google Docs, teaching staff handbooks, and Trello cards. I used to keep them in Gmail, but when I had to move to Outlook for work, I moved them outside any email platform so I could customize, organize, and annotate however I liked.

My personal Google Doc is literally called "Email templates" and is bookmarked for fast access. My course-specific Google Docs are in the top folder for each class and contain templates for my personal use. Both Google Docs include headings and subheadings to organize the templates and make them easier to find through Google Docs' table of contents. My teaching staff handbook includes any template I want my TA team to know about and use. The Trello template cards (yes, I have template Trello cards for my teaching staff and recurring cards in my personal Trello) are usually for more specific things that are part of that card and are unlikely to ever be used without the card itself. For example, I have a template card for sending the beginning-of-semester email to the entire teaching staff that contains a prior semester's email version.

Write the first draft of the template. Assume you won't get the wording perfect the first time. That's okay! The goal is to get it good enough that you'll probably reuse most of it, and the copy-pasting will save you time versus writing it from scratch. To lower the barrier of getting the template into your email template location, you can just copy the version you are about to send and deal with tweaking when you need it again. Before moving on, consider annotating what may need tweaking. Here's a concrete example of what I send students who need extra time on their exams:

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Subject: CS216: Exam TODO[exam number] book the testing center

Hello, Accommodation students,

It is now time to book with the testing center for Exam TODO[exam number]. It is on TODO[day of exam], and you should book your time to start between TODO[12:30 and 1:30 pm].

https://testingcenter.duke.edu/

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The most common way I annotate is by stubbing out things I already know need filling in with "TODO[text]." The text in the brackets is a note to myself about what to put there, or an example of what should go there, often the text I used when I first copied it into the template list. Above, I have TODOs with notes on the exam number and the day everyone is taking it. The last TODO reminds me to update it if the class time for that semester differs from the time I previously offered it. I typically only want extra time students to start at most 1 hour before everyone else. Another way to annotate the text is to change the color or highlight it. For me, that kind of annotation means removing the text if it isn't relevant.

Using and updating. Obviously, use your templates as often as you can. For updating, there are many reasons to do so. The main signal I listen to for updating a template is when I notice I never use some of the text, change it often, or get confused by it. My confusion mainly comes from reading the text inside a TODO and not knowing what I'm supposed to do. This often leads me to change a TODO from the first draft's old text to a description of what should be there. When it comes to the template file itself, I update it when the organization no longer serves me, and it's hard to find what I'm looking for.

Retiring a template. Since storage is cheap, I tend to not get rid of templates. However, deleting one is worth it when it is no longer used and is causing confusion. This mainly happens with shared templates because the context around them is only in my head, or I've forgotten it. So I've only retired templates that my teaching staff have access to.

Examples

You can see an example of a template I use for teaching in my blog post on reducing student emails. Another is when students pre-emptively ask for a permission code to join my class, but it still has empty seats:

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I'm glad to hear that you are interested in TODO[class]. That course has no prerequisites, so you should be able to enroll without issue. Are you having trouble enrolling?

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And here are a few more general examples:

If someone is coming to my office for the first time, I send them:

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If you have never been to LSRC, it's a big building with 4 wings, so I recommend getting to my wing (D wing) from the outside to reduce getting lost. For a Google map view of where we are, follow this link: https://goo.gl/maps/MogEnUUDXqVX4e2y7

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If a student is requesting to meet with me, I send them something like this to better control my calendar:

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To find a time to meet, please send me the times you are available for a 30-minute meeting and whether you'd like to meet in person or over Zoom. I will then send you a calendar invite that works in my schedule. My schedule is often in flux, so it's faster to find a time if I know when you are available and can lock something in on my calendar.

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What about AI?

If any of you are wondering, "Why not use AI to help write emails?" I actually do in some circumstances. However, a well-crafted template is faster because I know I wrote it when I was thinking carefully about what information is needed and how I want to say it best. If I use AI, I have to proofread anything it generates and confirm the information and style, which will likely require edits. So why not just think hard once, copy-paste, and fill in the blanks in the future? It's faster!

Getting Started

I hope this was helpful. To get started, I recommend the lowest barrier to entry: (1) Decide on an easy-to-access location, (2) Put some templates in it, and (3) Start using it. Only after you've used it for a while should you organize the document and update the templates to make it easier to use.

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