Owning a smartphone that allows you to check your email no matter where you are can sometimes be counterproductive. One of the biggest mistakes I make is to check my email when I know that I don't have the time to reply to the emails I read. If I don't reply to them on the spot, I tend to forget that they exist.

If you're anything like me, both Laytr and Deferred Sender are great services that are an ideal way to combat this problem. Rather than stop yourself from checking your email whenever your want, or disabling push notifications on your smartphone, use either service to remind you of the emails that could fall between the cracks.

Laytr

email reminders

What Laytr does is it allows you to re-send emails to yourself after any given period of time, whether it's one hour later, or one year later. It's up to you how long you want to delay the email being re-sent. Of course Laytr can be used for more than just reminding yourself of emails that you have received. It can be used, in general, as a reminder of just about anything.

You can either sign up for a free account, or if you're a Facebook user, you can simply connect Laytr to your Facebook account.

Once you're signed up, you can start sending email reminders to yourself using the easy to follow keyword system that they have set up. So for example, if you want to receive the reminder the next morning, you would send it to tomorrow@laytr.com. If you wanted to receive it after a month, you would send it to nextmonth@laytr.com. You can also specify an exact date and time to receive the reminder, by sending it to oct.2.1500@laytr.com, for example.

email reminder service

A full list of the keywords available can be found here, which is also available in Norwegian.

While Laytr has both paid and free accounts, the only difference is branding. There is no limitation on the number of reminders you can receive, which makes Laytr an invaluable, free service.

Deferred Sender

email reminder service

Another similar service that allows you send reminders to yourself right from your inbox is Deferred Sender.

Signing up for a free account allows you to not only send yourself reminders or forward emails to yourself at the time of your choice, but it can also delay your emails, allowing you to choose when your replies are sent to your colleagues or clients.

Simply send your email to deferred@deferredsender.com, and enter all the details of the email in the body.

Start the message with the email address you wish to send it to, followed by the time. You can also add email addresses to the CC and BCC lines. For example, if I want to receive a reminder the next day at 9am, the body of the email would look like this:

email reminder service

Check out Deferred Sender's [NO LONGER WORKS] Help page to see more methods on how to delay your messages by a few hours or to send it at a specific date and time. You can also log in to your Deferred Sender account to keep track of the emails you have scheduled.

email reminders

If you're going to use services like Laytr or Deferred to stay on top of your correspondence, be sure to schedule the reminders at times that you have set aside specifically for replying to emails.

One other possibility is Boomerang which Mark recently profiled, here on MakeUseOf.  This however is a browser extension / plugin and only works for Gmail accounts.

What methods do you use to stay on top of your emails? Let us know in the comments.