Improve Your Memory and Productivity, With the Help of E-mail

Personal productivity at work is a huge topic. There are many, many websites and books devoted to the school of productivity. This article is going to attack just one, very nasty phenomenon that drags down everyone’s productivity now and then: forgetfulness.

If you’re like me, you have many seemingly great ideas throughout the day, but you’d never get anything done if you stopped to dwell on each one. So how do you remember all of these thoughts? Everyone’s got their own system… post-it notes, jotting reminders on your hand, writing notes in your palm pilot, Mac OS X even has a program called “Stickies” that lets you put digital post-its on your computer’s desktop. Well, there’s a better way to remember those fleeting thoughts, and e-mail is the vehicle.

My method of carving ideas into stone is the very Norm MacDonald-esque note to self. Just as MacDonald would record “notes to self” on his miniature tape recorder during Weekend Update skits on Saturday Night Live, I suggest that you e-mail yourself whenever you have a thought that you need to recall later on, and you’re already sitting at the computer. E-mail is the life blood of most organizations. E-mail is the killer application. Nearly everyone is familiar with e-mail, and uses it daily. If you e-mail yourself an important thought, you’re going to check your e-mail later on and see it there, waiting for you.

I send e-mails to myself 2 – 5 times a day. My e-mail client is always sitting in my system tray, ready to alert me of new messages. Sending myself a message is just a few clicks away, and infinitely faster than removing my hands from the keyboard to jot something down on paper and stick it in my pocket. I’ll probably run that piece of paper through the washing machine before I see it again, anyway. Click, write, send, get back to work. That’s all there is to it. I’m done and back to work in 3 seconds.

Organize your e-mail notes-to-self with a GMail filter

For those who want to take this note-to-self e-mail scheme a bit further, there’s plenty of room for organization on the receiving end. Most e-mail clients support filters – custom rules you define, that are able to automatically examine incoming messages and then take some sort of appropriate action. The example I’ll use here is a GMail filter that automatically labels incoming notes-to-self:

1. Click “Settings” in the upper right-hand corner of GMail, then click on the “Filters” tab.
2. When the “Filters” tab loads, click on “Create new filter”.
3. In the “From:” field, type your complete e-mail address. If you use two different e-mail addresses, this should be the address that will be sending the notes-to-self.
4. Skip any other fields on the screen, and click the “Next Step” button.
5. A new screen will load. Check off the box to the left of “Apply the label:”.
6. Click on the drop down box to the right of “Apply the label:”, and select “New Label…”.
7. A popup box will ask you to enter a label name. Type “Note To Self” and press Enter or Return on your keyboard.
8. Click the “Create Filter” button.

After you click the “Create Filter” button, you’re done. From now on, every e-mail that you send to yourself will be automatically labeled “Note To Self”. If you’re so inclined, go back to GMail’s filters settings and experiment with the other actions that can be applied to incoming messages that match your filter criteria.