A super simple way to remind yourself to come back to a website later

There are plenty of bookmarking and ‘read it later’ tools out there, but those aren’t what this post is about. This post is about websites and links that you come across during the day that you don’t have time to browse then & there, but you know you definitely want to come back to in the not-so-distant future. In fact it’s so important that you return to the site that you want a email reminder to do it.

Thanks to a browser extension called Boomerang (yes I love Boomerang, no I don’t own shares and yes I mentioned it yesterday too) and a simple bookmarklet this becomes very easy. There is however a prerequisite…you need to be using Gmail because Boomerang only works with Gmail.

The Setup

FYI: Once you’ve done steps 1 to 3, it’s just one step whenever you want to be reminded to come back to a site later.

Step one: Install Boomerang. Boomerang is a browser extension that does a number of things; but for the purposes of this tip, it lets you send emails at a later time or date. It’s free to try for a month.

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Step two: Drag this link to your bookmarks bar → Come Back To

Step three: Right click that bookmarklet in your toolbar and edit the URL. You should see an email address that says “[email protected]”, change that to your own email address (it’s in the middle of that jibberish code, looks like this)

Step four: Browse the web and as you stumble upon things you want to be reminded about coming back to later, click the “Come Back To” bookmarklet that’s now in your bookmarks bar. A pop up Gmail window will appear, complete with the details of the page you’re on. All you need to do now is choose to send it later (see below). This is the time/date you want to be reminded about the site again. You’ll now receive an email with all these details on the time/date you’ve set.

Done. Now just repeat step four in future to save any links that you want to be reminded to come back to later.

Note:

There is a bookmarking site called Pistashio which provides this functionality but it doesn’t work as effectively as I’d like. By all means check it out though, we reviewed it here.