A major feature announcement at GoogleIO 2013 was Google Now Reminders. When Google Now was launched I was very excited for reminders, but it was implemented horribly. It would set an alarm, like a wake up alarm, to remind you. This is not how I want to be reminded. I ended up putting reminders into Google Calendar, but this was very tedious and often led to me not adding items and hoping I remember later.
Introducing Google Now Reminders
Swipe up to Google Now and say “Remind me in 3 hours to do the laundry.” You get the screen on the left.
From here you can set a different message or a different time. List of times include a specific time or: Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night, All day. Hit “Set reminder” and your done. When the time comes close Google Now will let you know, and at the time you will get a notification.
Note: Below I changed the reminder to be at 12:25 to show examples of what the notifications look like.
Why I Love This
I have wanted a good, simple, trivial to use reminder tool for a long while. We have lots of things we try to remember each day, we repeat it over and over in our heads all day. I subscribe to the idea of documenting ideas and thoughts in a wiki to free our minds to focus on more important things. But daily this is not possible. Thus trivial reminders like this are needed.
I have meditated every morning for the last month and I often find myself focusing on things I don’t want to forget. Google Now Reminders allows me to just tell my phone and forget it, freeing my mind with complete comfort. My wife will often text me to pick something up or call someone while I am in a meeting or in the middle of a pair programming session. I often try to use a sms app to resend the text, or delay notification and it just doesn’t work great. I can type the reminder into the search, and I’m done. There are so many times a day where we just want to say, remind me later to do this and now we can literally do just that!
My Recent Examples
In just the last few days here are some examples of how I have used Google Now Reminders:
- Remind me tonight to clean the cat box
- Remind me tomorrow to do the laundry
- Remind me this evening to pick up milk
- Remind me in an hour to create a story to improve performance on feature X
- Remind me to email my boss about my roadblocks tomorrow morning
- Remind me to call the AC repairman tomorrow afternoon
- Remind me to write a post about reminders tonight
Try it out. It’s awesome! “Ok Google, remind me to post my google now reminders post to google plus tomorrow afternoon.”
