Reminders

August 22nd, 2015
tech
Reminders are awesome. They let you take something you need to do later, and put it aside until it's actually time to do something about it. Whether you're a person who never fails to do what they've promised or one who is always forgetting, letting technology do the remembering can be really helpful.

For reminders to work well, though, they need to be as frictionless as possible. When something pops into your head you want to be able to offload it as a reminder and go back to what you were doing. If the process is too long or complex it's much harder to get yourself to do it. I really love entering reminders vocally here: I can literally enter one in less than 10 seconds. [1] How to do this on Android:

  1. If you don't already have it, add the google search widget to your homescreen. Then tap the microphone icon:

  2. Tell it what you'd like to be reminded about and when.

    tomorrow morning remind me to write a blog post

  3. Confirm on the next screen by pressing the blue checkbox. You can also say "yes" but that's slower. This is also the screen where you would fix things if it didn't hear you right.

If you'd like it to be more insistent when it goes off you can say "set an alarm" instead, but for silly Android reasons you can only do this for things in the next 24 hours.

I find this really useful and set myself reminders all the time.

(I actually find it awkward when I want to enter one in a quiet space with other people around, because then I need to use my fingers instead. This is a pretty amazing accomplishment for voice recognition, given how bad it used to be.)

[1] Timestamps:

    Fri Aug 21 21:19:25 EDT 2015
    Fri Aug 21 21:19:31 EDT 2015
Referenced in: Text-to-Speech Speed

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Effective Altruism: Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness

One of the most distinctive features of effective altruism is the use of the importance, tractability, and neglectedness framework for evaluating charities.

via Thing of Things April 23, 2025

Impact, agency, and taste

understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking

via benkuhn.net April 19, 2025

Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

When I thought about this question it was really hard to figure out because the way it's phrased it's essentially either a chicken just pops into existence, or an egg just pops into existence, without any parent animals involved. I thought about t…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts April 13, 2025

more     (via openring)