Request

[lorimt]

I'm trying to figure out how to implement a memory-aid I've wanted for a while now. Any assistance/advice would be welcome.

Basic goal: Fix my memory via notes to future self.

Implementation ideas (so far):
* Find e-mail client that will email me at a later time. (Current difficulties: don't want the emails to just have later time-stamp so that they show up first in list of emails. Don't want to have to look at an email for 2006 until, say, 2006.)
* Use handy new Google Desktop search to check daily for appropriate notes. (Current idea: dump all relevant notes into one gigantic text file as I think of them, then take advantage of Google's searching to daily search for everything with approximately the right date format. Current difficulties: I want to have this as a scheduled task (whole point is to have my computer remind me, not me remind myself.) Therefore, need to figure out how to make scheduled tasks thingy not just run Google Desktop, but run it with appropriate search string derived from date. This shouldn't be hard, but I have no idea how to do so.)
* Leave post-its all over random places. This is current method. Current difficulties: it doesn't work very well. Notes I keep around for any length of time get ignored. This plan could be fixed, in theory, with a big day-planner like object, but that leaves less flexibility for regular reminders.
* Really abuse scheduled tasks. Create a new one for every reminder I want to have. Current difficulties: this seems ugly and inefficient.

Desired features:
* Ability to enter a wide variety of dates/times. (Eg: Specific dates as combinations of [October, Oct., 10/] [nineteenth, 19th, 19] [2004, /04, 04, '04] or larger time intervals, such as Wednesday, or September, or 2004.
* Super-happy-shiny feature: recognition of relative dates: eg: tomorrow, next week, in 7 days, etc would all be converted into a date, and displayed then (when created) or alternately calculated from creation time when searched for (could restrict to a given list in such a case, so as to make at all manageable).
* Preference for quick location of relevant info. (ie: if an email sent to future, great, if Googled, hope to get relevant info quickly from giant file of doom, or to have enough of info show up in snippet to be useful reminder.)
* Shows up on its own. The only things I remember to do online daily are check email and read a handful of websites. I want this to have low effort on my part to be reminded, and ideally only mild effort to input new reminders. (Definitely needs to be easier to be reminded than to remind, however.)

Please let me know if you've got any advice on how I can implement this. In particular, if you know of an easy way to delay sending email (ideally w/Eudora) until a specific deadline, or to schedule a task to run Google Desktop with a search string culled from the clock, please let me know. I've been wanting this general ability for a long while now, and it seems like it should be relatively simple...

Comments

[boojum.livejournal.com]

Windows and *nix (and thus MacOS) both have the ability to do specific things at later specific times. E-mail probably counts as a specific thing. I think (adjust this for early-morning brain, please) that cron is the *nix tool and at is the Windows tool. There may be pretty interfaces -- the default interface for cron is pretty bare bones, at least.

[magicpacket.livejournal.com]

I keep a bunch of todo files. Like todo.movies, todo.books, todo.general, todo.random, etc. I don't look through them on a daily basis, but close enough that it works. That's mainly helpful for tasks that aren't yet completed, but can't be done immediately and you don't want to forget. Inside them I can put time limits on categories, such as asap, soon, sometime, eventually.

The `at` command under unix will run a command for you at some time in the future. There are ways of sending mail from the commandline. Put the two together and you've got a notification system built into turing or odin.

[rose_garden.livejournal.com]

oh, cool. That's really nifty.

[purplebob.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't know of anything that lets you send arbitrary e-mails into the future, even though that sounds like a really useful way to remember things.

Maybe such a service exists somewhere. Maybe it doesn't. If I had a more reliable server, and if I weren't so hosed with work that I shouldn't really be checking LJ right now, I would set up something like that.

The way I see it working is that you send an e-mail to a certain address with a line at the top saying when to e-mail it back. There are a couple of reasons why this may not exist already:

* If you send large files into the future, you get storage space for free (but then, GMail works just as well for that, and this thing could limit the amount of data you send)
* If you forge the From: address, you could use it as an anonymous remailer, and that could get abused easily. Maybe it could be set up to keep the headers intact, though, so it would just act like a really slow mail server.

Neat idea.

[meep.livejournal.com]

Microsoft Outlook lets you email yourself in the future. I just sent an email 2 hours after the fact, though you can select any date. The email does sit in your mail quota, though, until it is sent.

I wouldn't recommend using Outlook, but I don't have a choice at work.

[pitagrrl2.livejournal.com]

Hire a personal assistant! Or you could rely on a friend who has a lot of time on his or her hands *ahem* to keep track of your appointments. In my opinion, humans are much better than machines. At the very least, they're more squishy and lovable.

[willworker.livejournal.com]

There are many ways of doing this in unix. I could probably write something reasonably convenient to do this for you to operate on a unix box, but what would be really interesting is the suggested mail-to-remailer. I'll think about how it should be done, and maybe work on creating something.

Steve

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Publish your findings when you come up with a solution! We all want to know!

I just e-mail myself and put everything into one "schedule" inbox, which I try to remember to check through every day. Of course, that doesn't help so much for multiple events in one day, since I generally forget one or two of them. I combine this with setting alarms in my phone, so that it reminds me when something's about to happen. I should probably do that more often.

Eudora already supports this (more or less)

[lorimt]

So, apparently the magic word is queue. The interface isn't as entirely one-click as might be handy, but Eudora does allow you to queue up messages to be mailed on or after [specified date]. Since I don't care about things sitting around in my outbox until I want them, just sitting around in my inbox, this should work. Now to see how to goes in practice.

[partly-cloudy.livejournal.com]

There are also programs that act as on-screen post it notes (including popping up at a scheduled time). I've never tried them myself, but I know they exist.