Mon 9 May 2005
Time for a break from all the navel-gazing. Let’s do some traffic-whoring, and talk Getting Things Done. GTDMail works great for 90 percent of my time management needs. One thing it lacks, though, is a tickler. For GTD newbs, a tickler is a filing system in which you store reminders for future tasks. You really need this sense of time in order to defer items and get them out of your head. Bryan and I thought about writing one ourselves, but then we stumbled across FutureMail. It’s a simple little web app that emails you custom reminders at a specified time.
Let’s say my bank emails me to let me know that my next power bill is available, and due in three weeks. It takes five days for my electronic bill payments to go through. With Gmail alone, I would have to put the notice in my “@Waiting For” context, and remember to review it often enough so that I pay the bill on time. In this scenario, the bill never really leaves my mind, because there is a possibility that I could check “@Waiting For” on the wrong day, and end up paying late. Enter FutureMail. I log on and tell it to email me a reminder in two weeks, so that I have a two-day buffer. I put the original email from my bank into “@Waiting For”, so it’s available for reference. Two weeks later, I have an email from FutureMail in my inbox, telling me exactly what I asked for. I process it as I would any new item in my inbox. I can even set up Gmail filters to act on it just like any other new item.
This is literally the way a tickler should work. Everything in your tickler must end up back in your inbox at the proper time. The only drawback is that you have to enter your email subject and text manually on the FutureMail site. Fortunately, Ben is working on an email interface, so eventually I’ll be able to just forward stuff into FutureMail and forget about it until the right time. Et voila, mind like water.
Bonus tip: for microscheduling (setting reminders within the span of a day), I use IM Smarter. I send it an instant message in plain English , and it reminds me in two hours that I’m meeting someone for lunch. Those items don’t even need to be on my GTD radar.
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With the exception of the soon-to-be email interface, Airset (and probably many other online calendars) can do pretty much the same thing… plus they’ve got other features (Airset has a traditional calendar, contact lists, To Do/Other lists, and group calendar sharing… No offense to Ben, since I know how hard it is to create a cool web app. I just mention this for people who might be looking for something with a few more features (less systems to keep track of).
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Or you can use turbonotes or some other form of digital post-its. You can set alarms (recurring or one-time) for Turbonotes and hide them. I find them to be more flexible and faster than email since you can create and reuse Turbonote with a couple of mouse clicks and without having to open a new app or login to a site. And it’s faster than creating an email. However, one drawback is that Turbonotes are only accessible on your desktop and not on-line.
An on-topic comment from the Taebugger! woohoo!
It’s true that there are many scheduling and reminder apps out there, and they all work pretty well. However, Gmail has several GTD-specific advantages that are covered in the whitepaper I linked to — archival and search, fast user interface including hotkeys, and the whole label paradigm. Since I use Gmail as my “one inbox to rule them all”, it makes a lot of sense to use a reminder system that puts reminders directly into said inbox. Hence FutureMail.
I’m glad you like the microscheduling features of IM Smarter!
We’re hoping to continue to improve them (make them suck less) and would love your input as to how to make them better and more appealing. Hit me up and let me know what you think!
Cheers,
David Weekly
Founder of IM Smarter
IM Smarter is one of the few pieces of software I use that doesn’t suck in any way that I can tell. I like that it’s cross-platform and that the interface is completely transparent. I have too much clutter on my Dock (home) and system tray (work) as it is. This is also why I like FutureMail: once the email gateway is added, I’ll be able to interact with it entirely sans GUI.
I have one very minor nitpick about IM Smarter’s microscheduling: I wish I didn’t have to remember to add ‘am’ or ‘pm’ to the reminder time all the time. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s valid to assume that if ‘am’ or ‘pm’ is left off the time, the reminder should take place at the next occurrence of that time. If I tell it at 10 am that I have a meeting at 11:30, schedule it for 11:30 am.
Or I could just learn to use 24-hour time and be done with it.
Thanks for mentioning my app! I’m currently working on a web-based organizer application that will include the FutureMail functionality, plus a lot more.
I’m writing it with some aspects of GTD in mind. For example, I have action lists that let you not just check or uncheck items, but put them into “waiting on” and “someday” status as well.
Ben,
What are your ideas for the email interface? I’d really like to see something tickler-ish. For instance, in the subject you include the day of week, month, or the whole date in brackets. This is in line with the “43 folders” idea where you have a folder for each day of the current month, and farther out than that, a folder for each month.
Example subjects:
“Water the grass [wed]” (the next occurring Wed)
“Final exam [24]” (the 24th of this month)
“Start summer job [jun]”
“Wife’s birthday [8/15/05]“
You could optionally trim the bracketed part of the subject out of the reminder email.
It’s fast and easy to use. An interface for recurrent dates would be a little trickier, though…. maybe an asterisk beside the part in brackets?
“Band practice [Sat*]” (every Saturday)
Just a few ideas.
Since my PDA died I started looking for a simple solution like this. What I’ve ended up using is my Yahoo! mail account.
Storage has been bumped to more-than-I-need levels. They’ve also have email reminders for calander events and to-dos.
I’ve downloaded the Yahoo! synchronizer so that all of my work contacts and events are also loaded into my Yahoo! account (and vice versa). This ensures that as long as I can jump online, I can access all my information.
The coolest thing that I’m trying right now is text messaging. In addition to the email reminder, it sends a text message to my phone. So far this has worked great. Fifteen minutes (or whatever you set) before a meeting, buzz goes my phone.
Since I’ve already got the Yahoo! account, and have had it for years, it’s been a real natural for me.
Well, FutureMail has been down for a few days. Either we maxed out Ben’s bandwidth, or good things are coming down the pipe.
Any word on the status of the futuremail site. I’ve been waiting patiently for this site for about a week now but it’s always been down.
Are we sure its coming back or are we just wasting our time waiting?
I’d love to see it show up sooner than later obviously.
[...] ortcuts to mouse buttons. GTD with Gmail Whitepaper – Intergating GTD system into Gmail. Tickling with FutureMail – A “Tickle” system for FutureMail. [...]
I’ve just setup an email interfaced futuremail type reminder system using the gtdmail.org domain. Check my blog entry for full details if you are interested.
http://blog.mennos.org/nucleus3.2/index.php?itemid=91
[...] got to mention. GmailGTD obviously lacks a calendar/tickler. One solution I read about was using Futuremail as a tickler. But I needed something with a little more c [...]
[...] got to mention. GmailGTD obviously lacks a calendar/tickler. One solution I read about was using Futuremail as a tickler. But I needed something with a little more c [...]
This is not so revolutionary. I was commissioned to create something very similar for Lunar Logic a year ago which is now at http://email-me-later.com/
Paul
Email Me Later looks very useful, and addresses some of the shortcomings of FutureMail. I’ll have to play with it some.
Of course, judging by the May ‘05 post date, FutureMail predated Email Me Later by about a year…
[...] [edit]And I almost forgot to mention. GmailGTD obviously lacks a calendar/tickler. One solution I read about was using Futuremail as a tickler. But I needed something with a little more complexity, for example repeating events, calendar view, etc. So I installed WebCalendar on my server and it works great. It’s not super pretty (I haven’t even bothered trying to skin it yet) but it does the job. Only slight complexity to installation is setting up a cron job to handle email reminders which is actually really easy. Tonight I plugged in birthdays and anniversaries for all my friends and family with email reminders. [...]
Why not use the email reminders with Google Calendar? Same account as your gmail….
[...] links >> gtdmail GTDMail email tickler – stark raving calm Saved by bhakthan on Thu 02-4-2009 Tickling with FutureMail Saved by mjrindewitt on Wed 01-4-2009 Google Power – The Complete Guide to Google-ize Your Life! [...]
Keep blogging! Do you have anymore articles similar to this?
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