Persistence
Reminders that keep going until you deal with them
The problem is rarely that you did not see it. You saw it, you thought "yes, in a minute", and the minute never came back. A nag reminder is for the gap between acknowledging something and actually doing it.
"In a minute" is where reminders go to die
A single ring assumes that the moment it arrives is a moment you can act. Most of the time it is not, and a one-shot reminder has no answer to that.
You were holding something
A pan, a baby, a steering wheel, a patient's notes. You registered the reminder completely and had no hand free. By the time you did, it was gone from the screen and from your head.
You acknowledged it to make it stop
Dismissing is a reflex aimed at the noise, not at the task. The sound goes away, which feels like progress, and nothing else about the situation has changed.
You snoozed it into the past
Ten minutes becomes an hour becomes tomorrow. Snoozing is the socially acceptable way of forgetting something, and it leaves no trace that you have done it four times.
It happened at the worst minute of the day
The 18:00 reminder lands in the middle of cooking, homework and the door going. It is not that you would not do it — it is that 18:00 is the one minute you could not.
What the nag setting does
Timelee calls it Pinch Me in the app. Turn it on for a reminder and, instead of ringing once, that reminder re-rings on an interval you choose until you deal with it.
There are six intervals: every minute, every 5 minutes, every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, hourly, and daily. The 5, 15 and 30-minute settings and the hourly setting repeat six times and then stop. Every Minute and Every Day keep going until you mark the reminder done.
That split is deliberate and worth understanding before you use it. The six-repeat settings give you a bounded window — Every 30 Minutes is a three-hour window in which the thing has to get dealt with — and then they get out of the way. The other two do not stop on their own, which is either exactly what you want or a very annoying afternoon.
Choosing an interval you will not regret
For most things, a bounded setting is the right one. Every 15 Minutes gives you an hour and a half of chances at something that takes two minutes to do. Hourly suits a task that is tied to a day rather than to a moment, like sending an invoice or replying to somebody.
The unbounded settings are for a much smaller category: a dose, a deadline with a consequence, a thing you have already failed to do twice this week. Every Day is genuinely useful for a task you keep putting off, because it converts a one-day failure into a visible daily question.
Nag is set per reminder, which is the part that keeps it usable. If it were an account-wide setting it would apply to your whole list and you would switch it off within a day.
- Six intervals, from every minute to every day
- Four of them stop after six repeats on their own
- Every Minute and Every Day run until you mark the reminder done
- Set on the reminder, not on your account
What to pair it with
A nag decides how often a reminder comes back. The other controls decide how hard it knocks and what happens around it.
Snooze set to Off
Nag and an unlimited snooze cancel each other out. For a reminder that genuinely cannot slip, set snooze to Off so the only way to stop the ringing is to do the thing.
A louder channel
A nagging banner is still a banner. Pair the nag with an in-app call so each repeat takes the screen rather than joining a stack you have stopped reading.
Medication times
A dose is the clearest case for an unbounded nag: the thing has a fixed window, a real consequence, and a strong tendency to be interrupted.
Priority, so it reads as urgent
Mark it High or Urgent as well, so the reminder that is ringing repeatedly also sits at the top of the list when you finally open it.
A pre-alarm beforehand
A warning before the reminder and a nag after it is the full treatment: time to prepare, then no way to quietly drop it.
Auto Complete, where it fits
For reminders that do not need an acknowledgement at all, auto complete closes them out so they never enter the nag cycle in the first place.
Reminders that deserve a nag
- A dose at a time of day when your hands are always busy
- The invoice, the form or the reply you have now moved to tomorrow three times
- Anything with a same-day deadline you cannot renegotiate
- A task that takes two minutes and has been outstanding for two weeks
- The thing you dismissed on your lock screen this morning and cannot now name
Use it on a handful of reminders, not on all of them
A nag works because it is unusual. Turn it on everywhere and your phone becomes a source of noise you learn to ignore, which is the exact failure this feature exists to fix. A reasonable number is two or three live at a time. If more than that are nagging you, the problem is the size of the list rather than the loudness of it.
Escalation is the answer to silence, not a punishment for being busy.
Deal with the reminder and everything stops immediately. Nothing keeps ringing once you have marked the thing done.
Turn it on for the one task you keep moving
Pick the thing that has been on your list for a fortnight, set it to Every Day, and let it ask again tomorrow. It will stop the moment it is done.
Keep reading
- How Timelee reaches youThree channels, chosen per reminder.
- Snooze settingsIncluding the option to turn snooze off entirely.
- Why you ignore notificationsWhat habituation does to a reminder.
- Reminders for ADHDWhen a banner disappears the moment you see it.
- Medication remindersThe clearest case for a reminder that comes back.