followupthen

Emails to 2hours@followupthen.com with the phrase "You parked in D2" have saved my life more times than I can count. :)

Finally gave this a try. I'm impressed. Very simple and I'm personally fascinated by "invisible" products designed to accomplish simple tasks with as little friction as possible. Reminds me of @msg's Super.cc.

have u seen http://followup.cc

@ffumarola Yes, with power comes responsibility! Postponing emails (and tasks) is not always the best productivity strategy, and can create clutter if it's over-used – similar to a to-do list that gets overwhelmingly long. Regaring the "smarter" followup scenario, we actually just (2 weeks ago) released one of the features you mentioned: followupthen.com/how#response Ex: 3weekdays-r@fut.io The "-r" means "cancel if response". You can also cancel followups by forwarding a later email in the thread to 'cancel@fut.io', or use the search feature on our new My Followups page. FollowUpThen shines with "microtasks". The quentisential example of this is the email followup. Do you really want to add these to a to-do list? Or a calendar? Or leave it in you inbox? Sometimes an email reminder is all you need. Another clutter-reducing tip (outside of FollowUpThen) is to use a utility to unsubscribe yourself from bulk emails: ex: unroll.me Helps to get the unwanted stuff out of your inbox to eliminate distractions from the important stuff - like, you know, email reminders ; )

Forward, CC or BCC email to 3d@fut.io, etc, and be reminded at the appropriate time. It is similar to Followup.cc that got posted a while ago, but this one is much much cheaper. In fact the free plan should be good enough for most people.

I've tried using these email cc/bcc services and they wind up creating more email clutter for me and can annoy or confuse others when you cc instead of bcc (woops!). One service I've thought of using is Boomerang http://www.boomeranggmail.com/ because it seems to be "smarter" about followups. E.g. re-surface this email in Y hours/days, or only re-surface this email if no one responds to this within X hours/days, or send this email later. Anyone use any other tools that aim to help make email cleaner and more actionable at the same time?

@rsweetland it would be awesome if timezones would be based on where an email is sent from, or alternatively that the last email you forward to fut.io update the timezone in your profile. Timezones is always a hassle to keep up to date when you travel a lot. Mailchimp has a good system for this (updating subscribers' timezone every time they interact with one of your emails). Would this even be technically feasible? Other than that, I completely agree that this is great for those things that are too minor to put on a todo-list. I've occasionally put "reply to john doe" on my todo-list, but that just feels like a waste of time.