I also have many reasons to use the snooze and scheduled send features, including those in the blog post shown in the first post in this thread. Here is how I view these features:
Responding to new incoming messages
- When a new email arrives and I notice it, if I'm not busy I can read it (and any links and attachments) and take actions, which might include filing the message, adding labels, replying to the sender, and forwarding the message.
- But in many cases I don't have time to fully analyze the message and respond immediately. I could just mark the message as UNREAD (click blue dot or use More... Mark as unread or use the keyboard shortcut . u). But that method causes my Inbox to fill up with unread messages which are unprioritized.
- I could move the message to a "follow up" folder or apply such a label. But if I don't look at that folder or label in a timely manner and process all the marked messages, I can get behind and not act in a timely manner.
- Applying Snooze to a message lets me delay my actions until a future time/date when I might have more time or information.
After starting origination of a new message
- Once I start orgination of a new message (reply, forward, or starting from scratch), I have a similar problem if I can't finish the message immediately. I might not have time to finish a long response, or might learn that I need to get additional information.
- If I need to pause the origination process and know that my message is not ready to be sent, I can save my partial message as a draft.
- But what if I forget to complete the draft? To deal with this issue, after saving the draft I can immediatly navigate to the Drafts folder and snooze the draft! This will return the draft at the appointed time.
- If the message is good enough to be sent but I want to delay it until a better time for the recipient to get it (or I want to delay sending the message in case I come up with additional information), I can schedule future delivery. I can edit or delete the message before it's sent, but if I don't get around to that the message will still be sent as I originally wrote it.
Bill