Email Yourself Automatically Using Google Calendar

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how I set up regular reminder emails using Google Calendar. 

If you’ve seen some of my other videos, you’ll know that I use Gmail as the main single-stream communication funnel for the electronic information in my life. That means I check my email frequently.  I am also super forgetful and basically run my life on reminders.  I have lots of systems — see my plethora of videos — but many times, I would like a reminder delivered to my email inbox.  I've tried a bunch of solutions to this issue including Memo To Me and Boomerang -- some of which cost money, but I prefer to use Google Calendar since it is already a tool that I use frequently.

There are two types of email reminders. The first is an

Email Reminder with Appointment

So, sometimes I KNOW that I’m going to forget an appointment or to do something at a specific time.  Here are a couple of examples — I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled really early, like 7:30am, which is before I’ve really organized myself for the day. There is a 70% chance I’ll remember it too late and then have to run around with my hair on fire to get there on time. Or how about this — I agreed to leave a donation for the Lupus foundation, which I’m supposed to put out in front of my garage by 7am.  Yeah, I’m probably going to forget to do this and then they’ll either have to knock on my door or I’ll miss the pick-up window altogether.  It’s usually events that are out of the ordinary and a little too early in the day to be caught by my daily systems.  

For these occasions, I use Google Calendar’s email notifications.  They also used to have text notifications, which I used to double notify myself, but they got rid of those unfortunately.  So, this is for situations where I already have an appointment.  For example, here is a doctor’s appointment at 7:30am. I’m going to set a notification for this.  Ideally, I want 2 emails — 1 the night before and another about an hour prior to the appointment, so that I can be ready and leave on time.  In a browser, I just go down to Notifications, Switch it to Email and choose to notify myself 60 minutes in advance. Now I’ll add a 2nd Email Notification for 12 hours in advance.  Perfect. You can also do this on the Google Calendar mobile app.  One hour before is pretty straightforward. In order to do 12 hours in advance, you have to do a custom notification.  Then you get an email in your inbox that looks like this. That is all I need to move the appointment from my brain's hard drive over to RAM so that I can arrange my morning to make it to this appointment.  The second scenario is where I want an

Email Reminder with no appointment

Sometimes I just need a reminder, but I don't have an appointment on my calendar.  For example, I send myself an email every morning with a helpful link to fill out my Habit Change Form.  You can see my video on this somewhat nutty process of mine.  I also have this task in my Toodledo list, but I happen to like a convenient email landing in my inbox every morning as well.  But here's the thing - I don't want a daily appointment clogging up my actual calendar for a number of nit-picky reasons.  Here's another example -- I have an email reminder sent to me every Sunday afternoon to remind my husband to call his parents -- don't even ask.  I do not want this showing up on my Sunday calendar like an actual appointment, but I do like the email reminder.   

For these situations, I've created a whole other Google Calendar called "Lara's Reminders".  To do this, you'll have to access Google Calendar from a browser.  Hit the Gears icon, then choose Settings, now click Add Calendar then New Calendar and name it something.   Now, it should show up under My Calendars.  Now I'm going to enter my daily Habit Change reminder by putting in an appointment at 6am, calling it "Habit Change Form" and assigning it to the "Lara's Reminders" calendar with the drop down list.  Now I'm going to hit more options and then make it reoccur daily.  Now I'll add an email notification at 0 minutes in advance.  The last thing I'll do is add the Google Form URL to the description.  Anything in the description will get sent along with the email.  Okay -- now every morning at 6am, I get an email that looks like this.  I can just click on this link from the email and it'll take me directly to the form that I need to fill out every morning.   Now here's the thing -- if I go back into Google Calendar, I have this ugly daily appointment, which clutters up my calendar and I don't want to see.  To get rid of it, I just click it off here to the left and it no longer shows up!  You'll also need to click it off on your mobile app by hitting Calendars if you are using iOS Calendar, or by accessing the main menu if you are using Google Calendar.  If you need to make any changes to your reminders or add a new one, just click that calendar back on again to make it visible for editing.  

Remember, this will only send an email to the email that you registered your Google Calendar account to.  If you want gmail to forward only certain emails to a new email address, I have a video coming out on how to do that as well.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!