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In this day and age of email overload I find that I am having to contribute to the overload because individuals that I have exchange email or telephone calls with have committed to do something that invariably it gets buried in their hundreds if not thousands of email. Ultimately they forget the deadline unless I offer a gentle reminder.

I recently read an article on Itzy Sabo’s - Email Overload blog called Nagless Reminders.  The strategy that he outlines is actually great!  Rather than send a reminder of a committed deadline making you a "nag" simply reply sometime near the deadline with a "Thank You".   The key here is not replying immediately but replying near the deadline.   For example if you receive a commitment on Wednesday from someone to have something done by Monday, don’t thank them on Wednesday… thank them on Monday morning… the commitment just got pushed to the top of their list and you reminded them in a way that wasn’t "nagging".

That of course puts the responsibility on your to send the "nagless reminder".   You could simply create an outlook task to do this… chances are you already have a task in place for the item that needs to be completed anyway.  Something that I do is use ClearContext’s Defer feature.  When the commitment arrives I simply Defer it until I need to offer my nagless reminder.   This takes it out of my Inbox so I am not constantly reminded that I need to remind the person and "magically" it appears again when I told it to.  Productivity to the MAX.   I don’t forget about it and I don’t have to NAG the person I need to Thank for getting me what I need when they said they would.

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