Detail
Notes and detail pages that can ring
Notes apps are good at holding detail and bad at bringing it back. Reminder apps are the reverse. In Timelee the note and the reminder are the same object, so the detail turns up at the moment you need to read it.
The gap between the note and the moment
The detail lives in one place and the prompt lives in another. You write the meeting prep in a notes app on Sunday and set a reminder for Tuesday at 09:30. On Tuesday the reminder fires, you read six words, and then you go looking for the note — in the app you used last month, under a title you no longer remember, on the device you do not currently have.
Nothing was lost. It was simply filed away from the thing that would have made you open it. A note nobody is prompted to read is a note that does not exist, and a reminder with no detail in it is a prompt you have to research.
Timelee attaches the detail directly to the reminder. Every reminder takes a short note for the one-liners. When one needs more than that, it gets its own rich detail page — a proper document with a cover and an icon, attached to the reminder itself. The reminder rings on your phone. The page is what you read when it does.
What goes on a detail page
It is a document, not a text box. The formatting exists because real preparation is rarely a paragraph.
Formatted text and checklists
Headings, emphasis and tick boxes, so a five-step handover reads as five steps rather than as one long sentence with semicolons.
Tables
Rates, dates, room numbers, doses, part numbers. The things that are unreadable in prose and obvious in four columns.
Images and drawings
Drop in a photo, or sketch the layout directly on the page when the shape of the thing is the point and words are not going to do it.
Autosave
It saves as you write. There is no save button to forget and no version of this page where you lose the last ten minutes.
A cover and an icon
Enough visual identity that a list of detail pages is scannable rather than being twenty rows of similar grey text.
A time, and a way of reaching you
This is the part other notes apps do not have. The page carries a reminder, and the reminder carries a delivery setting.
The note is the thing that rings
Give the detail page a date and a time and it stops being a document you have to remember to open. At 09:15 on Tuesday your phone rings, and the thing behind the ring is the prep you wrote on Sunday, complete, formatted and already in front of you.
Because it is an ordinary Timelee reminder underneath, it takes every ordinary control: a category so work notes and personal notes stay apart, tags, a priority, a repeat if the thing happens every week, and a delivery setting if the meeting is the kind you cannot be late for.
- A detail page can be dated, and then it behaves like any other reminder
- Undated pages just sit in your notes until you want them
- Category, tags and priority work the same as everywhere else
- Repeat it weekly for a meeting that comes round weekly
Things that work well as a detail page
- Meeting prep, with the three questions you actually want answered
- A handover written on Friday and delivered to you on Monday morning
- A recipe, a route, or an assembly order you will be following one-handed
- Interview notes, so the follow-up reminder arrives with the notes attached
- A running log for something ongoing — a dispute, a renovation, a treatment
- A packing list for a trip that repeats, kept and reused rather than rewritten
The editor is a web feature; the ring is not
A rich detail page is written on the web, where there is a keyboard and a screen big enough for a table. Short notes on a reminder work everywhere. Once a page is dated, the reminder behind it syncs to your account and your phone is what schedules and rings it — so you can prepare properly at a desk and still be reached in the car park.
A note you are not prompted to read is a note you did not write.
The work of preparing is only useful if it reaches the version of you who has to do the thing.
Put the prep and the prompt in the same place
Write it once, date it, and let it arrive finished instead of being something you go looking for.
Keep reading
- Bucket listsLists that ring, not lists that sit there.
- Voice remindersSay it now, read it later.
- Picture remindersAttach the thing itself.
- Tasks and to-do listsA to-do list where the items chase you.
- Timelee on the webWhere the detail editor lives.
- Notes that resurfaceSilent by default, and able to ring when a note has a deadline.