Steven Robbins here. Welcome to the Get It Done guys quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Today's topic is making your email program's auto-complete feature your friend.

At my job, our wonderful email program has Autocomplete.

It remembers everyone I've ever emailed.

And as I type a name, it guesses who I'm emailing.

It hopefully shows everyone who matches what I've typed.

Pressing Enter, selects the one it thinks is closest match.

Voila!

My email is on its way.

Auto Complete can guess wrong.

That's all the theory.

In practice, what happens is this.

I decide to type a cute, romantic email to my sweetie.

I type sui, S-W-E, and hit enter, expecting the message to go, well, to sweetie.

I forget, however, that I created a distribution list to invite my theater-loving friends to a play. The list is Sweeney Todd attendees. A few moments later, my friends who were

expecting an invitation to a musical interlude about a psychotically murderous barber,

instead get a message that uses words like schmooopee awhoopi. From here on out, I can never get drunk

in their presence again. I would wake up the next day with schmopee-whoopi-wooped somewhere

embarrassing, and my real schmoo-y-whoop would not be amused. Now, when creating a temporary

list, I always name the list with the word temp in front. That's short for temporary, as in

temporary list. Since the only entries in my address book that start with temp are the temporary

lists, the slip of the fingers is far less likely to cause embarrassing confusion. My next party list

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