I Run My Life on Reminders

January 28, 2022

I recently passed a weighty milestone: 2,000 tasks in Appleā€™s default Reminders app checked off! It goes back about 2Ā½ years, which comes out to a little over two reminders each day.

Why so many?

Iā€™ve written before about how I believe that my memory is worse than the average humanā€™s. Reminders is my way of combatting that.

If I have a thought on the way to class, like ā€œI should get my Covid test after this class!ā€, there is a near-100% chance that I wonā€™t remember that in the right moment when class is over.

So instead I pull out my phone, hold the power button, and tell Siri to set a reminder. Never the app, always Siri ā€” fiddling with the actual date picker is too much work and Iā€™m lazy.

And when the time comes, a wonderful notification pops up on my phone and watch, and I remember to do the thing. I never check it off before I do it, but Iā€™m very strict about checking them off once I do it (I canā€™t stand the stale reminders sitting on my lock screen).

Thereā€™s something that feels very solid about Reminders. Iā€™m someone whoā€™s always jumped from one to-do list app to the next, so the idea of setting a reminder for months from now in a specific to-do list app is scary. But Reminders will always be with me ā€”Ā it has been for 2Ā½ years. So I feel comfortable offloading reminders for far in the future into the app.

I think thereā€™s also a bit of a danger here. My dad told me once that heā€™s never liked to-do lists, because they make him feel like a taskrabbit whoā€™s just checking off to-do items mindlessly. Thatā€™s no way to live, he told me.

But I somehow donā€™t have this feeling. I feel like Reminders is like an external memory, helping me to do things that I already wouldā€™ve wanted to do on my own. And in any case, my life would most definitely fall apart without it.

Get new posts by email (or RSS)!