Thanks so much Jacob and Stephen for your fast and thoughtful responses, and also for the link to the earlier post which my search hadn’t found (because my search term was too narrow (“tickler”)).
I did have the GTD/43Folders concept for a tickler file vaguely in mind, but also the functionality in most email clients that lets you snooze an email for a specified period before popping it back into the Inbox (Incidentally and completely off-topic, I may be the last person to realise that (in Fastmail at least) you can snooze messages from your Sent folder, but this is incredibly useful for chasing tardy respondents.)
Anyway, from your posts I see two approaches that appeal to me in the absence of a dedicated function for this:
- Use Things as I originally envisaged, but with some automation as suggested to capture the title and UUID into Things and simultaneously add a “deferred” tag and archive the note. This has the benefit as noted of letting me see what I have coming up in Things alongside all my other commitments
- Simply use a “deferred” tag and corresponding Workspace, and review this periodically. I already have a weekly repeating task for Friday afternoons in Things to review & clear out my various Inboxes (with checklist items for Drafts, email, Things, Devonthink), so it wouldn’t be a big leap to either have a separate task to review the Deferred Workspace, or to add it as another checklist item in my existing weekly task. As a refinement, I think it would be useful to make an action to (a) tag and move the note I want to defer, and (b) add a line just below the title saying Deferred to: [date]. The point of (b) is that when I reviewed my Deferred Workspace I could see quickly whether a note needed my attention yet.
- Or use both of these together – reviewing a Deferred Workspace has the advantage of surfacing things that have been deferred well into the future, i.e. further forward than I would normally bother to look in my Things weekly reviews.
Thinking about my requirements a bit more, part of the challenge here is to find the balance between automation and mindfulness about what I’m doing. There’s some benefit in a little friction, in taking the time to review what’s deferred, etc. I think both the approaches above would be somewhere near the right balance.
Thanks again. I’ll try these out and see how I go.