4 ms·

Apple's Reminders app does all of those things and many more without having to learn emacs

koakuma-chan 1y ago
Ironically the Reminders app sucks at reminding. I use the Clock app for my todo list; it makes a pretty loud noise pretty reliably, which makes it pretty good for reminders.
- haukilup 1y ago
  Being pedantic, based on your example, I think the Reminders app does a good job at reminding, but a bad job at alerting. But that’s because a reminder to me is a gentle concept.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- YVoyiatzis 1y ago
  I believe the Reminders app, when used alongside Notes and Calendar, is becoming a strong competitor in the productivity space. One feature I'd love to see added is persistent nudging reminders that keep alerting you until you manually dismiss them. Things 3 is another excellent third-party option in this category. Together, these apps form my essential productivity stack. I honestly can't function without them.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- not_kurt_godel 1y ago
  I agree it would be nice to have more alarm-like notification options. Flagging, setting as high priority, and assigning a date/time and getting in the habit of checking the Today category regularly all help mitigate; a bug-me-until-this-is-done feature would be a welcome alternative. (I will note that the GP's emacs stack isn't even close to offering native mobile push notifications, to state the obvious.)
- svachalek 1y ago
  Yeah I think this is a result of the attention economy, there are 75 million notifications per day that someone somewhere wants to push in your face so we've gotten really good at cutting them out. But the counter-swing is also too big and now critical things like calendars and reminders are buried in a list we never look at.
- saltcod 1y ago
  "Reminders" is maybe the most poorly named app of all time. The last thing it does is remind you of anything.
- bluGill 1y ago
  Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app. For a todo there is no now, it is pick the best thing todo next. I need to be interupted for my dentist appointment. However I don't need to be interupted to buy milk, I need a remineer when I'm at the store anyway to also get milk. If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work.
  - fknorangesite 1y ago
    > If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work. Reminders basically does have this: you can set a given item to alert when you are arriving/leaving from a specific location.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      I don't know that app, but I don't want a specific location - milk can be had at hundreds of different stores in my town. While it isn't all the same there are only about 4 different suppliers to all those stores.
      - themadturk 1y ago
        It's not so bad when out of those hundreds of stores, you only shop at one or two. Few, if any of us, show at all the possible stores in town.
  - derefr 1y ago
    > Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app. Ehh. The thing with a calendar "reminder" is that calendar apps assume that any such reminder is irrelevant once the time you set for the reminder goes by. They exist to remind you that some time-sensitive real-world event is starting, in time to be ready for it; but once that event has ended, you must have either done it or missed it — so either way, the calendar forgets about it. Whereas a reminder / "todo with a date" object in a reminder/todo app, makes a different assumption: that you still need to do the thing, even if you didn't interact with the reminder when it first popped up. So the reminder is still there, glowing brightly, and often pops back up with further notifications, until you complete it. Three examples from my own calendar of the type of reminder I'm talking about here, if you can't yet picture what I mean: • It's time to replace the filter in my cat's water fountain [and take apart and scrub all the parts of the fountain while I'm at it.] (This isn't urgent — there's no particular need to do it exactly when I'm reminded of it — but it grows more urgent the longer it is left undone. The persistence of the reminder helps me to remember to do it, if I was busy when I first saw it.) • I've gotta either pick the specific meals going into my meal-box subscription service box by midnight Saturday, or skip the week (or the service will pick randomly for me, giving me things I really don't want to eat, and I'll torture myself trying to motivate myself to cook those meals anyway, because I don't want to waste money/food.) I set this one to go off with two explicit "pre-notifications" twice — once at 7PM on Thursday, and again at 9PM on Friday. It then goes off again on its own, a little bit before midnight, and that's the final warning. (And, of course, if I check it off before then, the other notifications associated with that instance of the reminder won't fire.) I also usually just leave the Friday 9PM one unacknowledged + open as a toast on my computer until I've picked it, to ensure I won't get distracted and forget about it. • Pay my credit card bill. (I have monthly autopay set up, but my understanding is that they still get to charge some minimal amount of interest for any charge that remains posted + not paid down for 21 days. So I set a reminder to pay the card down every 14 days. Again, not urgent per se — the worst that happens is that the 30-day autopay kicks in. But I find it a convenient time to review the last 14 days of charges for any strange activity; and the longer I go without doing that, the more of a schlep that starts to feel like — so biweekly is actually good here. To be clear, I had all three of these set up as calendar events before — and they didn't work very well that way! Repeating reminders have much better semantics here.
radley 1y ago
I found Reminders to be unreliable and foolishly designed. It only works for must-do tasks. It uses repeating-period instead of time-since, so it can't handle repeating tasks that are optional. If you fail to mark off a repeating task, the next instances stack up and crash the notification cycle.
- not_kurt_godel 1y ago
  I'm familiar with the pain point you're describing. In general, I would say a recurring calendar event is a better solution for your particular preferences. Personally my mental model is that the act of deciding to not do an optional task constitutes completion of the reminder for that occurrence. And if I forget or deprioritize that decision, the reminder still hangs out in my Today list until I do as a mitigation.
  - radley 1y ago
    I still use my calendar for routine time-window reminders. But when I tried timeboxing tasks for after work, those don't stick because my daily work hours can shift by as much as 2 hours, depending on how many pre-work-hours meetings I have that day. I'm a big fan of automation, so half of the fun with that project is setting it all up.
    - not_kurt_godel 1y ago
      If you work at an office, you can set your reminders to be location-based with daily recurrence so that you get reminded when you leave the office or arrive home. I imagine you can also integrate Reminders with IFTT if you want a "Done with Work" button on your phone if you WFH.
treetalker 1y ago
Reminders.app does a great job when I want create lists and inventories! I use it for groceries and webpages too. For example, I've sent many of the Emacs-related links to my Emacs list in Reminders, where I know I'll be able to find them the next time I forget Gall's Law and look for a more-complex system to replace my current one: writing things down; thinking about what I've written; redrafting; and repeating.

Ironically the Reminders app sucks at reminding. I use the Clock app for my todo list; it makes a pretty loud noise pretty reliably, which makes it pretty good for reminders.

haukilup 1y ago
Being pedantic, based on your example, I think the Reminders app does a good job at reminding, but a bad job at alerting. But that’s because a reminder to me is a gentle concept.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
YVoyiatzis 1y ago
I believe the Reminders app, when used alongside Notes and Calendar, is becoming a strong competitor in the productivity space. One feature I'd love to see added is persistent nudging reminders that keep alerting you until you manually dismiss them. Things 3 is another excellent third-party option in this category. Together, these apps form my essential productivity stack. I honestly can't function without them.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
not_kurt_godel 1y ago
I agree it would be nice to have more alarm-like notification options. Flagging, setting as high priority, and assigning a date/time and getting in the habit of checking the Today category regularly all help mitigate; a bug-me-until-this-is-done feature would be a welcome alternative. (I will note that the GP's emacs stack isn't even close to offering native mobile push notifications, to state the obvious.)
svachalek 1y ago
Yeah I think this is a result of the attention economy, there are 75 million notifications per day that someone somewhere wants to push in your face so we've gotten really good at cutting them out. But the counter-swing is also too big and now critical things like calendars and reminders are buried in a list we never look at.
saltcod 1y ago
"Reminders" is maybe the most poorly named app of all time. The last thing it does is remind you of anything.
bluGill 1y ago
Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app. For a todo there is no now, it is pick the best thing todo next. I need to be interupted for my dentist appointment. However I don't need to be interupted to buy milk, I need a remineer when I'm at the store anyway to also get milk. If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work.
- fknorangesite 1y ago
  > If the reminder was 'i see you are going in the direction of a store: we need milk if you have time to stop' that would work. Reminders basically does have this: you can set a given item to alert when you are arriving/leaving from a specific location.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    I don't know that app, but I don't want a specific location - milk can be had at hundreds of different stores in my town. While it isn't all the same there are only about 4 different suppliers to all those stores.
    - themadturk 1y ago
      It's not so bad when out of those hundreds of stores, you only shop at one or two. Few, if any of us, show at all the possible stores in town.
- derefr 1y ago
  > Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app. Ehh. The thing with a calendar "reminder" is that calendar apps assume that any such reminder is irrelevant once the time you set for the reminder goes by. They exist to remind you that some time-sensitive real-world event is starting, in time to be ready for it; but once that event has ended, you must have either done it or missed it — so either way, the calendar forgets about it. Whereas a reminder / "todo with a date" object in a reminder/todo app, makes a different assumption: that you still need to do the thing, even if you didn't interact with the reminder when it first popped up. So the reminder is still there, glowing brightly, and often pops back up with further notifications, until you complete it. Three examples from my own calendar of the type of reminder I'm talking about here, if you can't yet picture what I mean: • It's time to replace the filter in my cat's water fountain [and take apart and scrub all the parts of the fountain while I'm at it.] (This isn't urgent — there's no particular need to do it exactly when I'm reminded of it — but it grows more urgent the longer it is left undone. The persistence of the reminder helps me to remember to do it, if I was busy when I first saw it.) • I've gotta either pick the specific meals going into my meal-box subscription service box by midnight Saturday, or skip the week (or the service will pick randomly for me, giving me things I really don't want to eat, and I'll torture myself trying to motivate myself to cook those meals anyway, because I don't want to waste money/food.) I set this one to go off with two explicit "pre-notifications" twice — once at 7PM on Thursday, and again at 9PM on Friday. It then goes off again on its own, a little bit before midnight, and that's the final warning. (And, of course, if I check it off before then, the other notifications associated with that instance of the reminder won't fire.) I also usually just leave the Friday 9PM one unacknowledged + open as a toast on my computer until I've picked it, to ensure I won't get distracted and forget about it. • Pay my credit card bill. (I have monthly autopay set up, but my understanding is that they still get to charge some minimal amount of interest for any charge that remains posted + not paid down for 21 days. So I set a reminder to pay the card down every 14 days. Again, not urgent per se — the worst that happens is that the 30-day autopay kicks in. But I find it a convenient time to review the last 14 days of charges for any strange activity; and the longer I go without doing that, the more of a schlep that starts to feel like — so biweekly is actually good here. To be clear, I had all three of these set up as calendar events before — and they didn't work very well that way! Repeating reminders have much better semantics here.

radley 1y ago

I found Reminders to be unreliable and foolishly designed. It only works for must-do tasks. It uses repeating-period instead of time-since, so it can't handle repeating tasks that are optional. If you fail to mark off a repeating task, the next instances stack up and crash the notification cycle.

not_kurt_godel 1y ago
I'm familiar with the pain point you're describing. In general, I would say a recurring calendar event is a better solution for your particular preferences. Personally my mental model is that the act of deciding to not do an optional task constitutes completion of the reminder for that occurrence. And if I forget or deprioritize that decision, the reminder still hangs out in my Today list until I do as a mitigation.
- radley 1y ago
  I still use my calendar for routine time-window reminders. But when I tried timeboxing tasks for after work, those don't stick because my daily work hours can shift by as much as 2 hours, depending on how many pre-work-hours meetings I have that day. I'm a big fan of automation, so half of the fun with that project is setting it all up.
  - not_kurt_godel 1y ago
    If you work at an office, you can set your reminders to be location-based with daily recurrence so that you get reminded when you leave the office or arrive home. I imagine you can also integrate Reminders with IFTT if you want a "Done with Work" button on your phone if you WFH.

treetalker 1y ago

Reminders.app does a great job when I want create lists and inventories! I use it for groceries and webpages too. For example, I've sent many of the Emacs-related links to my Emacs list in Reminders, where I know I'll be able to find them the next time I forget Gall's Law and look for a more-complex system to replace my current one: writing things down; thinking about what I've written; redrafting; and repeating.