Borrow My Brain

I use GMail and Google Calendar extensively to manage all my tasks. There’s one feature idea I had that would make this incredibly easier. Here’s how it would work.
When you’re viewing an email and click Archive, there’d be an optional dropdown labeled ‘Remind me in:” followed by a list of times (one day, one week, one month, etc.). When sending an email, the dropdown would also appear.

After the time period you choose passes, GMail would automatically return the conversation to your Inbox as unread. In other words, you’re setting a reminder to yourself to deal with this email again at some time in the future.

This would be useful in many situations:

• When delegating work, it would be an automatic reminder to follow up on its progress.
• When networking, you’d want a reminder to keep in touch with a person you met. You could set it to remind you in 3 or 6 months.
• When implementing Getting Things Done, this feature would eliminate the need to have those 43 folders (31 days + 12 months) that you’re supposed to use to remind yourself of future to-dos.
• When you just don’t want to deal with something now, but don’t want to forget about it either.

Currently, if you want to remind yourself to follow up on something, you either have to create a special label ‘Followup’, and remember to check it often, or go into the calendar and add an event, which is a cumbersome process that completely breaks your workflow and concentration.

So many tasks in life and work correspond directly with emails, and it’s a cumbersome process to have to create calendar entries for all of these. Setting a reminder for an email to pop back into your inbox is a much easier and elegant alternative.