Have you made email work for you? Do you spend the time and effort to make emails look perfect and professional? There's an art to it, but it's not that difficult. Your reward will the response from the person you want an answer from.

Yes, on a task-heavy day you can't lean in and craft a masterpiece with every email. However, there are some tricks that will not only save you the bother but also give you back some extra time. Canned responses are one such trick. Email templates are another.

Use Email Templates to Boost Email Productivity

Canned responses and email templates are similar. The difference is in the way you create them. You have to create your own canned response with Gmail or any other text expansion tool. Or simply save it in a Notepad file somewhere.

Email templates are freely available on the web. Borrow them and tweak them to your situation.

ProEmailwriter gives you a neat interface to select the right kind of email template and use them in your email. The dropdown menu gives you choices for Topic, Sub-Topic, and Tone. Copy the one you need and customize it to your situation.

You might like that "Tone" allows you to select a formal and casual voice. For instance, you might want to go for a casual conversation over email after you have established a bridgehead with a face-face meeting.

There are several topics to choose from. For me, Confronting Someone and Requesting Something are two valuable picks. The template for the first helps me to be polite but assertive. The second empowers me to ask. Many of us tend to overthink our way to paralysis over both these social tasks.

You can also contact the developers for more email templates when an idea strikes you.

Do you have a set of email templates or canned responses? What kind of template do you use often?