If you’re like me much of what goes on in your world these days revolves around email. It’s become the center of a great deal of my communication and how I schedule meetings, follow-up with prospects and clients, and assign tasks in the office.

The toughest challenge I face in email management is keeping track of follow-up emails. I get and send a lot of email that involves some sort of follow-up to check in with someone or to schedule a future appointment. I also send queries to people that ask me to follow-up in a month or two.

I recently started using a new service called NudgeMail and I think it’s a game changer for this kind of follow-up productivity.

NudgeMail is an email reminder service, but works in a unique way that makes it a key tool for me. Many reminder services are simply that, you visit a site, set an alarm, and it alerts you. NudgeMail is completely email-based and more of a take on the traditional tickler system that many people are familiar with.

You simply send or forward an email to NudgeMail and it creates the reminder complete with full details contained in the original email. You just keep working and never leave your email tool.

Now if I receive or send an email to or from someone and determine that I need to follow-up in a few weeks, I simply send or forward the email to NudgeMail with a date set-up in the subject and I’ll get a reminder email on that date and time with the content of the email included. This may be one of the most important innovations I’ve encountered in a long time. It’s so simple yet indispensable.

Here’s how NudgeMail works at the most basic level:

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 add a subject for your reminder with a colon after the day, date, or time like this – Tomorrow: Pick up milk. You can find a full list of commands here.

For now the public beta service is free and requires no sign-up or set-up. It works with most email services and is billed to work on most mobile devices as well, although you may not include attachments in your nudge emails.

Premium and branded enterprise paid versions appear to be in the works.