Getting Things Started

So you want to use PingMe to help you get things done?

That's awesome! It's our personal choice of trusted system for remembering important tasks and events, and we hope you'll feel the same. Let's jump right in so you can see how to get started.

A ping is simply the thing you need to remember to do, like "Follow up with Michael Scott," or "Move your car; don't get towed!"

Since Wednesday night is the only time you have this week to do laundry, you don't want to forget. In fact, you really don't want to forget, so we'll set this ping to be really annoying, it will remind us every ten minutes after 6pm.

Targets describe where to send a ping. For now we'll use the default one, which points at our e-mail account, and was created for us when we signed up.

Simply click the name of the target, i.e. 'my Gmail' to select it.

Here we've also elected to assign the tag 'chores' to this ping. Once we have lots of pings, tags become an easy way to organize and find previous or upcoming pings.

After we click 'Save', we see a red sticky note appear on the screen, which tells us that this is a pestering ping. It reads naturally, telling us what the message is, when it will be sent, and to where (and to whom, but we'll get to that later!)

6pm rolls around and we start getting 'Do the laundry!' every ten minutes in our mailbox. At this point we'll decide whether or not we can take care of this task like we had planned, and we can respond 'done', 'stop', 'off', or 'ok' to turn the ping off.

We can't do the laundry just yet because we stopped for a beer and groceries on the way home, but we don't want to forget about it. We'll send a reply message telling PingMe to remind us at another time.

Responding is easy: we just enter '2h' (or '2 hours', '2hrs', etc.) on a blank line and PingMe will reschedule the ping for two hours from now.

If we refresh the PingMe screen, we can see that the ping was updated to be sent 2 hours after it received our e-mail. Remember that you'll keep receiving this pestering ping until you write back any of the following: ok, stop, done, or off. For a full description of the scheduling commands, please see our help page. You can even create pings from your e-mail account or phone.