How to Make Your Reminder System Totally Useless

Photo by dharmacat

We all have calendars. I have a calendar. My wife has a calendar. Do you have a calendar?You probably have a freaking calendar.

Of all of the amazing affordances offered by the technological advancement if recent years, calendars and other time management applications have come a very long way. Things like wakeup calls, egg timers and paper calendars have fallen out of vogue and into memory for most of us. Now, instead of trying like hell to remember when my dentist appointment was, I can configure my swanky Google Calendar to alert me exactly 1 minute before my appointment starts. Not bad, but my reminder system has a giant Achilles’ Heel: my reminder-happy ass.

The quickest way to send a reminder application or system into the crapper is to overuse it. My phone beeps at me every morning to remind me to update my task lists and check my calendar for the day. Every morning this happens and you know what? I’m now completely numb to the distinct “you have a reminder” tone coming from my pocket. And it’s not just that particular alarm, young squire — virtually any alarm that shows up on my iPhone might as well be telling me the time of day for all the good it does me.

Perhaps you are in a similar predicament, grasshopper. Maybe your favorite reminder service is chiming and popping up and emailing you all the live-long day to the point where you simply tune it out, no matter what it’s trying to remind you about. There is hope in the following skim-friendly bulleted list:

• Change the sound – my favorite reminder application is Remember the Milk. Their service includes the option to change the notification sound between several choices. Going from the “La Cucaracha” to the sound of an old-timey car horn might do me good. Look into the available options for your solution, as changing it will effectively reset your mental barrier to paying attention when it beeps.
• Adjust the time (slightly) – This works especially well for alarms that repeat every day (see the next point for how to deal with those), but it can work for any of them. If my phone gurgles at me and I see 9:00am exactly on my clock, I know it’s a reminder. My wife doesn’t send me text messages at 9:00am, computers doe. Make it 9:02 or 8:58 to obliterate another potential reason to ignore it.
• Get rid of daily reminders – If there’s something you need to do every single day, then you should take better steps at installing it as an actual habit and remove the need to rely on a piece of software to do it. The only glaring exception here is when you need to do something related to medicine at a specific time each day (take a pill, give yourself an injection, whatever). Otherwise, try adding it to an action list you maintain so you can check it off as complete.
• Create the reminder within one day of the thing – I have reminders in my little system set to go off several months from now. If the system stays as is, I’ll totally miss the alert that reminds me what my son wants to do for his birthday this summer (piñata). Perhaps this would be better suited for a calendar that I check every day? Then, every day (or the night before) I can schedule all of the time-specific reminders I need for the next day! Brilliant!

As with all of my horse puckey time management and efficiency tricks, your mileage my vary.

Do you use a reminder service? Which one? Do you have the “remind me to tie my shoes” problem?

Tagged as: alarms, efficiency, iphone, remember the milk, reminders