Deal with email faster using smart responses on the Apple Mac

Do you spend far too long writing and replying to emails every day? Speed up the task and deal with them much faster by creating smart responses that save time and effort. Step-by-step guide.

The amount of email in our inboxes is increasing every day and there never seems to be an end to it. Dealing with it takes up far too much time and our day would be much more productive if there was a quick way to sort it.

There is and you can create quick responses using Mail on the Apple Mac. By typing two or three characters you can fire off a response to an email in no time flat. It is a brilliant time saver and it is very easy to do.

Imagine being able to reply to emails in seconds and with hardly any typing. It is easily possible and you just have to set up your Mac the right way. Let’s take a look at one way to blast through your inbox at maximum speed.

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1 System Preferences

Go to the Apple menu at the left side of the menu bar and select System Preferences. Click the Keyboard icon and then select the Text tab in the window. What we are going to do is to create shortcuts that can be expanded into long phrases.

Go to the bottom left corner and click the plus button to add a new item to the list.

2 Replace With

You first type the shortcut in the Replace column and here we have entered git. When we type this, it will be replaced with whatever we enter in the With column. Enter Got it thanks!

git - Got It Thanks! - get it?

This is a three letter shortcut that will be expanded into the full phrase whenever we type it. It works in a lot of applications on the Mac where you can enter text. We will be using it wit emails, so we will create phrases that are useful when creating or replying to messages.

Often people email and ask if you got something, or they’ll send something and you need to reply back that you got it.

3 More phrases

Here is another shortcut. Click the plus button at the bottom, then enter cio in the Replace column and I’ll check it out as soon as possible. in the With column.

cio - check it out. It is useful to use shortcuts that are easy to remember. Add more phrases and then close System Preferences.

4 Reply to an email

Open Mail and select an email you want to reply to. Click the Reply button. Click in the message body and enter one of your shortcuts. As soon as you type cio, the whole phrase appears below I’ll check it out as soon as possible.

5 Enter the phrase

Just press the spacebar to expand the shortcut you typed and replace it with the phrase. Just think - three letters, hit Send and you’re done!

These shortcuts can be used when creating emails or replying to them. All you need to do is to think what phrases you use the most in your messages and to create shortcuts for them using Keyboard in System Preferences. It is brilliantly simple and a great time saver.

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