Remind me later

Problem

I have a problem. I’m really forgetful at remembering to do things, even when I have the best of intentions. I’m in awe of my wife every time she remembers an appointment she booked weeks or months ago. I’ve tried so many things. I tried calendars, and I keep getting the reminder, looking at it, thinking “yep, I’ll do that soon,” and then forgetting to do it. I’ve tried methodologies like Getting Things Done, and I love the idea, but I’m just not good at keeping up the maintenance of those task management approaches. I’ve tried a range of apps, and none of them quite do it for me.

The other thing is I find it easiest to remember things and easiest to engage when using SMS. SMS is what I pay attention to. So I thought, why not make a Getting Things Done inspired task management app that relies on SMS as a primary interface, with reminders that keep nagging me into marking things off, and a power-user-friendly UX.

What it does

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a productivity system aimed at getting things out of your head into structured lists, keeping those lists organised so your activities are planned, and conducting a weekly reflection to update them. It’s a great system if you keep on top of it, but I never could. Remind me later builds an automated system around my own flavour of GTD, helping me stay on track and do the things I want or need to do.

SMS-first reminders

Given my preference for SMS, I made it one of the main interfaces for this app. I get reminders via SMS at the scheduled time, with follow-ups if I haven’t completed a task. I can engage conversationally to mark tasks done, snooze them to later or to another day, or just skip them. This is the key thing that helps me commit, because I can’t just ignore it. It’s not something sitting away on my desk that I have to remember to go back to.

The trade-off is the cost. SMS isn’t free; a few cents per pop turns into real money at scale, which is why most apps don’t do this. I’m not at scale. I’m building this for myself, and a dollar or two a week is worth it for an app that does exactly what I need and helps me stress less about remembering things.

Today and timeline

Capture is for everything new. Designed to be as low-friction as possible, with smart defaults and minimising the number of taps to reach each option.

Today shows all of today’s reminders, with one-tap options to mark as done, snooze to another time or day, or skip. To speed up actions I purposefully avoided confirmation prompts, instead opting to provide a time-limited undo option for destructive actions.

Timeline shows me everything I’ve already added in the future, in a scroll-friendly timeline. To be honest I don’t use this view as much as I expected to: getting tasks out of my head and into Remind me later, combined with the start of week review, leaves me with enough peace of mind that I don’t feel the need to repeatedly scan through what’s coming up.

Weekly review

The weekly review is where I sit down for five minutes and plan all of the things for the week and when I’m going to do them. I can shuffle things around and push others to future weeks to make the plan achievable. It’s a guided flow with no skipping; you have to complete each step. Honestly, a lot of people would probably hate it. It really, really works for me.

This is the key part of the workflow that creates a smooth experience for me. By deferring as many decisions as possible to the weekly review, capturing a task becomes much easier. I don’t have plan a specific day or time for things months in the future. Fixed-time things get fixed times. But for everything else, like fertilising the garden or planning a holiday, I can capture it in 5 seconds for an approx time in the future, and rely on the weekly review to surface it for more specific scheduling closer to the date.

Next

I’m using Remind me later every day, but I still have a lot of ideas in the backlog. Next, I want to try gamifying habit completions to help me stay on track. I’m also toying with creating a multiplayer version where you can team up with a partner and plan both shared and individual tasks in one place.

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