Sometimes I forget things, I suppose we all do to some degree. I’ve come up with a few different techniques for reminding myself about things depending on the task/time/info. If someone mentions something at work at the end of the day sometimes I’ll leave a post it note on my monitor so that I’ll see it in the morning. Sarah does something similar at home, she’ll leave herself a note on the bathroom mirror before going to bed so she’ll see it in the morning.
A year or two ago I saw a friend of mine leave a reminder for himself by calling his work number and leaving a voicemail. I thought it was rather odd at the time, but since then I’ve done it a few times myself. What I find is that when I call work number (usually from my cell phone) and leave voicemail explaining what I’m supposed to remember, the mere act of leaving the voicemail tends to keep that info/task in my thoughts. As a result I usually end taking care of what ever it was that I needed to do before I even check my voicemail in the morning. So this idea of leaving reminders via voicemail seems to work, at least so far.
The next step from there is some sort of timed message reminder. I’ve done this before with alphanumeric pagers using QuickPage (qpage), which allows to schedule your alphanumeric page to be sent at a given date and time in the future. Many calendar systems do the same thing with email, reminding you of upcoming events. What I’d like to have schedule voice reminders.
I want to be able to call a number, leave a message and schedule when I want that message to call me (i.e. 4 Aug 2005 @ 4:15pm). I should also be able to tell it which phone number to call (cell, work, home, friend?) and optionally to try them all in a given order if no one answers, or if the voicemail or answering machine picks up instead of a person. On top of all that I should be able to optionally sync calendar items via some sort of text to voice via the same service. Perhaps with some email integration also?
I wonder if the mobile phone providers will jump on this idea. Heck, no reason the land line providers shouldn’t be able to jump on this. Anyone with a large capacity voicemail system should be able to add some extra smarts to implement at least some of these ideas.