Online Reminder Services Give a Free Nudge

If you could benefit from an occasional or regular cyber-nudge to get started on a project, call your grandmother, or somesuch, then these free online reminder services may be up your alley:

Memo to Me: Allows you to set up one-time, daily, weekly, monthly or annual reminder emails with as much content in them as you wish. With its straightforward, simple interface you can be up and running in just a few minutes.

HassleMe: Works like Memo to Me but with a twist: It’ll nag you (their language) via email at semi-unpredictable intervals. The idea is that if you receive a predictable reminder, it becomes easy to ignore it. So, they’ll email you based on the rough intervals you choose. They plan to add an instant messaging feature soon, too, making it even harder to ignore their nagging.

Beeplet: Lets you create simple reminders deliverable via RSS or email (IM coming soon, apparently). It’s got a few more Web 2.0 bells and whistles than Memo to Me, but may seem a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with features like RSS, tags and bookmarklets. A big plus is that Beeplet lets you add a button on your own site that will automatically add your events or reminders to the alert list of anyone who wishes (like a training attendee). At the moment, Beeplet doesn’t play well with the Mac’s Safari browser.

I was skeptical about online reminder services when I first heard about them. After all, can’t you just set up your own reminders in Outlook or other similar software you already own? But there’s something about receiving an email reminder that makes you sit up and pay just a bit more attention.