Working Smart: Automated Email Follow-up

I’ve mentioned before the value of not abdicating responsibility for items you’re waiting on from others. Here, Michael Hyatt posts a great tip for making sure that tasks you’ve delegated via email stay on your radar screen. Basically you BCC these items to yourself and run a mail rule to shunt your reminder into the correct folder.

Now, whenever you want to track an assignment that you are delegating via e-mail, just enter your “waitingfor” e-mail address in the BCC field. (Since most e-mail software packages sport an auto-fill feature, you can generally do this with a few keystrokes.) Now, send your e-mail. If everything is set up correctly, your e-mail will go out from your main account and you will receive back an e-mail from your new “waitingfor” account. Your email rule will automatically file it in your “Waiting For” folder.

Very clever idea. And I’m thinking that with a bit of AppleScript fu, it would be easy for an Entourage rule to not only move the item to the waiting folder, but to also automagically generate a “Flag for Follow-up” Task for a week or so later under your “Waiting” category. Who’s up for a little Lazy Web, huh?

Also, unless I’m mistaken, you don’t actually need a second email account to do the “YOURNAME+anything@example.com” trick. Just use your regular old email address, in the format described; I believe most (if not all) email servers ignore anything between the “+” and the “@”. Update 2005-09-15 11:55:59: I was incorrect; you do need a second email account. Lo siento.

[via Lifehacker]