Remind Yourself To Respond To Emails With Nudgemail

Frank Gruber November 5, 2010 Tweet

Your email inbox is a sea of opportunities. Everyday I try to keep up and get through all of them but a lot of times items get lost under the fold of the Web page, tucked out of view, kept as new until I have time to circle back and dig out. I have many friends that religiously live by Inbox Zero but I can never seem to get there as the emails flow in like a river. So I may miss your email and I apologize in advance. It’s not you, it’s me.

Various products are chipping away at different aspects of email overload. For example, Awayfind serves to reduce time checking email by enabling a direct line of communication to my mobile phone or Twitter for important message. And Gmail Priority Inbox has attempted to help too, but it hasn’t been introduced to business accounts yet so it’s not much use to me. Otherinbox helps to organize my mail into a more scannable list, helping to reduce the noise. Despite all of these tools, I still have a lot of email to go through and just like the U.S. economic deficit, it’s really just a matter of trying to keep the numbers at a somewhat managable level.

This week we were excited to hear about the launch of a new service to try and help you remember to reply to emails so you no longer miss the opportunities and gems sitting in your inbox. The service is called Nudgemail and it offers an free and easy-to-use email reminder system that can be setup on-the-fly without registration.

How does it work? Nudgemail is simple yet brilliant at the same time. To start using the service you simply forward any email that you want to be reminded of to the service with the day or date you want to be reminded of it. For example, if you need to respond to an email by Friday you could forward it to friday@nudgemail.com and the service will forward the message back to you on Friday so that it is on the top of the pile. It works the same with full dates and months. To get a full list of commands, send an email to commands@nudgemail.com or help@nudgemail.com.

I know what you are thinking, isn’t this just adding more email to your inbox? It is, but it is also helping to bring the stuff that gets lost at the bottom of the heap to the top – and most importantly for any productivity tool, it should help to reduce the mindshare it would normally take to remember which items you need to respond to; as long as you can trust the service, you can put the email out of your mind until Nudgemail reminds you. And if you can keep a clean inbox, getting a reminder email should just reinforce your already solid email practices. Ultimately, Nudgemail is a simple tool that can help you stay on top of the ocean of emails in your inbox.