Almost all of us rely on email for daily communication, and one the main advantages of this form of communication is that it is virtual instantaneous. But have there ever been times that you have thought it would be useful to be able to send an email in a couple of hours’ time? But what if you’re going to be away from your computer or busy in a couple of hours? Boomerang for Gmail is a browser plugin that can be used to schedule emails to be sent in the future to overcome this problem.

The plugin is available for Chrome and Firefox and it has a variety of uses. If you run a small club or business and want a quick and easy way to send out a newsletter at a particular time over the weekend, you can have it prepared in advance and Boomerang will take care of things for you. This in itself it useful, but the extension has plenty of other uses as well.

If you are a fan of the idea of zeroing your inbox, Boomerang is a tool that could help. You can use the extension to take emails out of your inbox for a certain period of time before returning them so you can see them only when they are needed. This is also a great way to keep track of conversations – you can mark a thread up so that if no responses are received in a few days, you will be reminded to chase it up.

Reminders are another great use for Boomerang. If you want to be sure that you remember to pay the telephone bill, why not schedule an email to be sent to you a day or two beforehand? Boomerang is very versatile, whether use as a tool to help improve productivity or as a labor saving device to save you from having to do things a set times.