Use Emails as Reminders? Here's a Good Tip

I can't break the habit of sending myself emails as reminders. I've tried various other approaches (todo lists, notes, etc.), but nothing puts an important task right in front of me until I get done like having it in my email inbox.

Most of the reminder emails I send come from my phone (since if I were at my computer, I could usually do whatever I'm reminding myself to do). Eventually I got tired of typing my relatively long name or email address — or rather, enough of it for it to come up as a suggestion — so I created a new Google contact named "me". The only information "me" has is my personal email address, so rather than typing in my name to send myself an email, I simply type "me".

But that's not all. If you've read my previous post, Five Simple Gmail Tips, you know that if you use Gmail, you can append a plus ("+") to your email address, then any arbitrary string after it, and you will still get the email. So rather than just give the new "me" contact my regular email address, I used "my.email.address+todo@gmail.com". In Gmail, I set up a filter based on incoming mail to "my.email.address+todo@gmail.com", so any "todo" email that comes in automatically get starred, and assigned the "todo" label.

So far, this technique has worked out really well. It makes a low-tech, very simple solution slighter higher-tech, and even more effective.

For more email tips, see my previous post, Five Simple Gmail Tips.

Comments

[Ben Simon]

Thanks for the tip Christian. I'm always looking for ways to use the + hack in Gmail - it's just so cool.

I use Jotter on my G2 which makes it really easy to send TODO's to my inbox.

You might want to check out Jotter's suggested gmail inbox setup. It uses multiple inboxes - a very cool feature I never thought I'd need, but now love.

-Ben

[Laura Rush]

This is a great tip, thanks Christian!

[Quentin]

I set up a simple filter in Gmail:

Matches: from:me to:me
Do this: Apply label "note-to-self"