Come Time Traveling With Paper Doll
Stephen Hawking thinks travel tourism isn’t likely, because we’re not surrounded by visitors from future days. Carl Sagan thought maybe these travelers from the future are here, but just aren’t sporting their “My parents went to Pompeii to see Mount Vesuvius erupt, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” memorabilia.
The truth is, the more I think about organizing, the more I realize that it’s an entire system for time travel…if only in one (forward) direction. After all, the reason we organize is so that we can find what we need (in the future, when we’re looking for it) and have the right information so we can know what we need to know (when we need to know it).
Organizing is far less about the aesthetics of how things look now than how they will function when we need them to, and everything we do to organize our homes, our offices, our schedules and our lives is geared toward making our futures successful. For example:
- We can file our auto insurance policy in the legal section of our family files system, preferably in the legal section, so that in the future, if ever we are in an accident, or wish to compare the elements of our policy with a new option, we’ll be able to find the information quickly.
- We can store charitable contribution confirmation letters and receipts for tax-deductible expenses in our current year’s tax prep folder so that, in the future, when we prepare our own taxes or turn the material over to our accountants, we’ll maximize our deductions.
- We can organize business cards and contact information for essential people in our card file or computer database so that, in the future, if the baby breaks out in red spots, we can find the pediatrician’s number; if the toilet starts overflowing, we can find the not-too-expensive-and-makes-late-night-housecalls plumber we adore.
- We can place pieces of paper (coupons that trigger us to take our cars in for oil changes, invitations that remind us to buy wedding presents, bills that have to be paid or questioned) representing tasks we have to perform in the future in a date or month slot of our tickler files. (Loyal Paper Doll readers know that I believe so strongly in the organizing powers of a tickler file that I wrote an ebook,
Tickle Yourself Organized, to help everyone maximize the benefits of this almost magical tool.) - Sometimes, the best way to get information to our future selves is to avoid paper altogether.
For short-term messaging, I often advise clients to use technology to send non-paper messages to their “future selves”. For example, if a person scribbles a note to remember to buy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on the way and sticks it in his pocket, how likely is he to remember to look in the pocket just prior to passing the grocery store? Not very likely! However, setting the alarm on your cell phone for about 5 or 10 minutes prior to when you’ll be in the vicinity of the store is an easy way to send a message to your future self and get the task completed.
Call from home to leave reminder voicemail messages to complete work tasks; call the house from work to leave messages regarding household tasks; and call from your cell to leave messages regarding both is. It’s a little bit of time travel combined with another sci-fi standard, communicating with an alternate-reality version of yourself. (Let’s hope the alternate versions of you don’t scarily sport different features like creepy mustaches and evil laughs.)
Sometimes, we need to get a message to our future selves while an idea is fresh in our minds. Wouldn’t be useful, when we’re still smarting from the emotional tribulations of spending time with our hopped-up-on-Thanksgiving-turkey annoying cousins, to send a message to our pre-Thanksgiving-selves for next year with some soothing advice to avoid the same conversational pitfalls? How about reminding your future self of the travel inconveniences you faced after this trip, so you’ll be forewarned before next annual conference?
You may be wondering what got Paper Doll on this time travel kick. Last year, I reviewed some To-Do list sites, including the now defunct I Want Sandy and the no-longer-free Jott, which allowed you to send messages to your Future You. However, I’ve recently become aware of some sites that allow you to send emails in the same manner:
Future Me.org is a website designed to let you speak with your future self. (While it would certainly be more helpful, at times, to have our future selves send email back in time to advise us, it seems they haven’t worked the kinks out on that yet.) The premise simple. Enter an email address for yourself that you believe will be valid in the future, create a header and message, and specify the date of delivery. FutureMe does not require any registration, so you could use it anonymously to communicate with future versions of others, as well as yourself.
Use it to congratulate yourself for an accomplishment you (hopefully) have achieved by the time of receipt, to motivate you to take action, or to keep prompting you with the idea for that Great American Novel. If you’re planning to take a trip a year from now, send yourself an email to arrive about a month in advance of the trip in order to remind you in which drawer, file or safe you’ve placed your passport.
FutureMe is currently set to allow messages to be sent up through 2037; one imagines the founders assume we’ll have mastered real time travel by then.
Future Mail, unlike FutureMe, requires a simple registration. You supply your email address and password, then click on a link in an opt-in confirmation email. From there, once you’ve identified your time zone, you can create a new subject line and message to be delivered at the time and date of your specification.
You also have two options; the message can be delivered as email and/or as part of a public RSS feed for a personal “blog” it sets up on your behalf. Unlike Future Me, Future Mail only allows you to send this mail to registered address and not anonymously to other recipients.
Mail to the Future.org (not to be confused with the now-defunct MailtoTheFuture.com) is a third option for having a fun (one-sided) chat with your future self. Aesthetically, the site is more visually pleasing than either bare bones competitors, FutureMe or FutureMail; you can also email friends in addition to yourself, though not anonymously.
To register, supply your email address and name; MailTotheFuture.org then provides you with your temporary password, which you can change at any time after logging in, via the “Change Your Settings” function. To send your message, you specify the year, month, date and hour for message delivery, create a subject and message content, and your time travel has begun. You cannot specify the moment.
The biggest disadvantage is that MailTotheFuture.org uses Central European Time to set the time zone. Thus, if you don’t live somewhere longitudinally similar to Albania, Malta or San Marino, unless you’ve consulted a world time zone map or converter, your email may arrive some number of hours earlier than you anticipated. (Paper Doll has always suspected that time zones are a subtle form of time travel, but that’s a subject for another day.)
Letter Me Later is definitely the most advanced version I’ve found among the free options for sending email at a future date. (In fact, this blog post was already set to go live when a message…possibly from the future…instructed me to look into LetterMeLater.com!) I sense that while the other sites were designed specifically for a fun one-off experience, LetterMeLater.com’s founders envision a more complete online email experience…with an added benefit of time travel.
LetterMeLater.com makes date setting flexible, so you can either send email on a specific date, or you can specify “in 72 hours”, “next Thursday”, “tomorrow at 3:15p”. LetterMeLater.com also allows for html messages and attachments to emails, features not seen in the other free accounts.
You can also send messages via LetterMeLater.com without actually visiting the site (once you’ve created your account); instead, you can send from your own email account, using your personalized LetterMeLater.com email address. The site allows you to import contacts, send emails with CC and BCC options, and even send text messages.
[LetterMeLater.com has an additional nifty feature for blog and website owners: a widget you install so that your readers can send their friends nifty information about your site/blog, either now or for far-future receipt.]
FutureMe.org, FutureMail, MailtotheFuture.org and LetterMeLater.com all currently provide free accounts. Paper Doll generally advises against expenditures for fun, non-essential organizing tools, but there are paid services out there, including:
l8r has a free demo and allows you to schedule email to yourself and others at some future date. However, l8r’s focus is the paid service ($1.99 for 100 emails, $4.99 for 500 and $9.99 for 1000), which provides for sending one message to multiple recipients, sending html and not just plain text, appending attachments, and avoiding both the l8r-branded signature block and a six-month account expiration.
A potential problem related to using all of the above future-email sites is ensuring that the address to which you send the email will still be working in the future. Lifehacker columnist extraordinaire Gina Trapani has some timeless advice for future-proofing your email address.
Readers, please remember, organizing is your own best defense against the vagaries of the unknown future. Organize your papers, your resources and your information so you can access what you need, when you need it. Whether you’re living life linearly or manage to prove Stephen Hawking wrong and become a time tourist, it’s always good to be able to tell yourself where you’ve put your passport.
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