Following Susan Schreitmueller's advice in the 28-hour Workday presentation she gave, I started replying in subject lines and using [EOM, NRN] to indicate the end of the message and that no response is necessary.

Not everyone's familiar with this convention, so I always included a short explanation in the body of the message. After a number of these EOM/NRN messages, I created an AutoHotkey macro to save me a few keystrokes. I set up !eomnrn to expand to "EOM - end of message, NRN - no response needed", and I used that in the body of the message.

I thought it still took too many keystrokes and mouse clicks to reply to a message, add my note to the subject line, add "[EOM, NRN]" to the end of the line, and type in the explanation in the body of the message. In fifteen minutes, I whipped up this little LotusScript agent that prompts you for a response, puts it in the subject line with an explanation, and sends the message off.

In Lotus Notes, use Create - Agent to create an agent called something like "1. EOM - NRN". Edit the agent and put this in the Initialize sub.

	Dim workspace As New NotesUIWorkspace
	Dim session As New NotesSession
	Dim db As NotesDatabase
	Dim collection As NotesDocumentCollection
	Dim memo As NotesDocument
	Dim reply As NotesDocument
	Set db = session.CurrentDatabase
	Set collection = db.UnprocessedDocuments
	Set memo = collection.getFirstDocument()
	While Not(memo Is Nothing)
		Set reply = memo.CreateReplyMessage( False )
		response = Inputbox("Response to " + memo.Subject(0))
		If (response <> "") Then
			reply.Subject = response + " re: " + memo.Subject(0) + " [EOM, NRN]"
			reply.Body = "EOM - end of message, NRN - no response necessary"
			reply.IsSavedMessageOnSend = True
			reply.Send(False)
		End If
		Set memo = collection.GetNextDocument(memo)
	Wend

Then you can select the message(s) you want to whiz through, type Alt-A 1 to call the action, and reply quickly. You can also call it while viewing a message, which is probably a safer place to start.

Enjoy!