NudgeMail targets Inbox Zero

Today San Francisco’s Stage Two launched NudgeMail – a new service that aims to make email management and reminders dead simple by integrating them seamlessly into your inbox.

By dead simple, I mean no plug-ins, no software downloads,  no registration, and no accessing of other online services. It’s been built to work through your existing inbox just by sending emails the way we’ve all been doing for years.

According to Stage Two co-founder (and Montreal-born) Jeremy Toeman, NudgeMail was created for one simple reason – they really needed it.

I hate having a cluttered inbox. It bothers me. Maybe more than it should. Having a pile of messages staring at me whenever I checked my email really got on my nerves.

I am the Founding Partner of Stage Two, where I manage a handful of employees and a swath of clients. On any given day I can get anywhere from dozens to hundreds of emails (typically the latter). I do my best to deal with most of them, but many messages are simply not actionable right away. Messages that I needed to deal with later just sit in my inbox.

And they cluttered it up.

And they aggravated me.

It was hard to find messages when I needed to. Sometimes things would slip through the digital cracks. Did I mention the psychological angst associated with my cluttered, unactionable inbox? Oh, there was angst.

The NudgeMail solution really is simple. Rather than trying to manage too many emails in your inbox and likely neglecting a handful of them, Nudgemail allows you to email specific messages or reminders to yourself in the future. Here’s their how-to:

1. Create a new email (or forward an existing one)

2. Set the “to:” to nudge@nudgemail.com

3. Set the “subject:” to the day, date, or time when you want the NudgeMail to come back to you. For example, “Monday” or “Tomorrow” or “Oct 13″ or “2 hours” are all acceptable ways to send a NudgeMail

4. Enter anything you want in the body of the email, then hit Send!

*You can also use colons to set a subject for your email. For example, you can send a NudgeMail to nudge@NudgeMail.com with the subject “Tomorrow: Pick up milk”

Alternatively you can send the mail to a day/date/time@nudgemail and it has the same result. You get the reminder or the forwarded email when you asked for it.

To test it out now, send a message to 5m@nudgemail.com and you’ll get a response five minutes later.

The Techvibes TV crew was in San Francisco last week and had a chance to sit down with the Stage Two’s Toeman and co-founder Adam Burg to get some pre-launch details.