Gmail has become my calendar. And thanks to the blessed “Snooze”, also in my stress reliever

I’m not a fan of to-do lists. Here I am very much of the philosophy of Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Exchange, and who years ago published the post “Everything” (great title) talking about the subject. For him, with the things that matter, “I have never needed a to-do list to tell me I had to do them.”

But of course, that does not mean that in the daily routine it is not useful to aim according to what things. Here everyone has their own techniques and in the face of the fever for apps like Notion or methods like Bullet Journal, I use a somewhat peculiar system.

I write down important appointments on the calendar, for example, but whether I’m at home or away on my phone, if I need to create a reminder, what I always do is simply: send an email to myself.

I do it constantly for things that I want to do in the short term—that day, that week—but also to “share” with myself topics that, for example, I have discovered and that I think could be interesting for Xataka. In my case there is an additional reason to use this method and no other: I spend many hours in front of the computer, and there is a tab eternally open on it: Gmail.

The idea can be extended to other apps—sending WhatsApp messages to yourself is also quite popular—but I always end up using Gmail for three reasons. The first, habit: I can only do it that way. The second, the integration with Google calendar, which allows me to move that reminder to an appointment in my calendar if I consider it necessary.

And third, and probably most important, that Gmail has a “Snooze” option, which is wonderful and has been available for a long time. When I send an email to myself it appears in the inbox with the subject in bold, making it clear that it is pending reading, but if it is a note or a reminder of something that I can leave for later, I take advantage of this option and I simply postpone it until a date and time that I deem appropriate.

Here I would perhaps ask Gmail to add a faster Snooze option. Currently, when you choose that option, you get preset options to show that message again in the inbox “Later today (18:00)”, “Tomorrow (8:00 AM)”, “Next week (Monday, 8:00 AM)” and then displays the option to set a custom date and time.

Here I would prefer something faster like postponing 2/4/8 hours, for example, so that we could postpone that message over and over again in those slots in addition to also being able to set a date and time to our liking. That is of course my use case, and perhaps the really ideal thing would be to be able to precisely configure the snooze options for each user.

All in all, Gmail’s Snooze option is in my opinion one of the great improvements that the service has received in recent years. Having an endless list of unread emails in your inbox can be a cause of stress for some and being able to postpone the non-urgent ones Release that little anxiety from Inbox Zero.

And now forgive me, but I just remembered something pending. I’m going to send an email via Gmail to myself.

Image | Rubaitul Azad

In Xataka | My email was a mess until I discovered Spark