You’ve got a planner, a Palm Pilot, and enough sticky notes to wall paper one side of your room. But you still forget things. Why?

The fact is that when you’re really stressed—the weeks when everything goes wrong, and you’ve missed about every deadline you’ve had due to emergencies that derail every attempt to get back on your track—you don’t even look at your planner. No, your time management tools are buried under paperwork, and the sticky notes have long stopped being useful simply because there are too many to keep track of.

And that’s assuming that you’re the type who’ll keep a calendar to begin with. Many of us aren’t. Realistically, we forget to jot things down (an unfortunate habit that becomes far worse the more stressed and distracted we are).

Enter, the email reminder. No matter how disorganized you are by nature, or how toxic your schedule may be, you’re bound to check your email. It’s the way the office system has evolved, and our work habits have changed with it. All business and personal correspondence is now coursed through the web, and even if you no longer have the time to go to the bathroom and brush your teeth, you’ll still (albeit hurriedly) quickly check your email for any new updates or instructions.

Setting up an email reminder means that whatever happens, you never forget the important things: it’s right there in your inbox, the digital equivalent of a secretary hovering over your table.

Email reminders can also help cut down on your paper clutter—which, you have to admit, are one reason we feel that our business lives are spiralling out of control. If you’ve got dozens of papers stuck on your bulletin board, you can’t sit down at your desk without feeling that your deadlines are screaming at you.

Besides, it’s hard to tell at one glance which of those dozens of reminders are due today. It can all be overwhelming: which are most important? Which need to be taken care of right now, or can wait until next Tuesday? You can set up an email reminder to give you your schedule piece meal, so even if you are swamped with work you’re at least able to focus on the most essential.

Email reminders are also part of the move for a fully integrated digital office. It makes more sense to streamline your work day so that everything you need to do is centralized in one place. You write memos and reports on the computer, send them through email, and simultaneously check what’s next on your to-do list. For a hyper-busy executive, that’s more “natural” than having to rummage through your papers for your planner, or wasting time retyping all the information on your Palm Pilot.

Email reminders can help you take back control of your schedule. No, it won’t do the work for you—but it can make it easier to manage your work flow, so you don’t get this toxic again.