Record
What you finished, and what you missed
Most apps make a finished task disappear. That feels tidy until somebody asks whether the invoice went out on the 3rd, or whether the dose was taken yesterday, and you are left reconstructing a week from memory.
A tick is not a record
Ticking something off is a satisfying gesture and a poor filing system. The item goes, the list gets shorter, and the information about when it happened goes with it. A week later the only evidence that you did the thing is your confidence that you probably did.
That is fine for taking the bins out. It is not fine for the things where the question comes back. Did the dose get taken on Thursday. Was the client actually chased before the deadline. How many of last month's viewings did you follow up. These are questions with answers, and the answer should not be a guess.
In Timelee, a reminder that is completed goes to history and stays there. The same is true of the ones you missed. Reminder history is the paper log the app was always implicitly keeping, made visible — and it is as useful for the pattern it shows as for any single entry in it.
The pattern is the point
One missed reminder tells you almost nothing. Six weeks of them tells you something specific and actionable: that the 18:00 one is the one that goes, every time, because 18:00 is when you are cooking. That the Friday admin block has not survived a single Friday. That the medication is fine on weekdays and slips at the weekend.
None of that is visible while completed items are vanishing. Once there is a record, the fix usually turns out to be a setting rather than willpower — moving the time, changing the days it fires, adding a pre-alarm, or putting the one that keeps failing on a channel that does not let you swipe it away.
- Completed reminders are kept rather than deleted
- Missed ones are kept too, which is the more useful half
- See the hour and the day where things consistently slip
- Change a setting rather than promising yourself you will do better
What the record is actually for
History is the boring feature that makes the interesting ones adjustable. Four things it answers.
Proof you did it
When somebody asks whether the thing went out on the 3rd, the answer is a record rather than a recollection. The same is true when the person asking is you.
Whether a dose was taken
Doses are the hardest thing to remember remembering. A completed medication reminder tells you whether this morning already happened.
What you keep missing
The missed list is a diagnosis. It names the hour, the day and the kind of reminder that does not survive, and those are all things you can change.
How a category is doing
Work, Personal, Grocery, Home. Looking at history by category shows which part of your life the app is genuinely helping with and which one it is not.
Whether a shared reminder landed
Assigned and acknowledged are different things. Shared reminders record accept and decline, so a handover has an outcome rather than an assumption.
The detail comes with it
Pictures, voice notes and detail pages stay attached to the completed reminder, so the record is the whole thing rather than a title and a date.
A ten-minute review that is worth doing monthly
- Open the missed list and look only at the times, ignoring the titles
- Find the hour that appears most often, and move those reminders by half an hour
- Find anything that has been missed three times running and change its delivery channel rather than its wording
- Check whether the things you always complete really needed a reminder at all
- Look for a category with a lot of misses — that is usually a sign the list is too long, not that you are failing at it
- Delete the repeating reminders you have dismissed every week since you made them
You cannot fix a pattern you cannot see.
An app that deletes what you finished is optimising for a clean screen rather than for a useful one.
Keep the record, then use it
A month of completed and missed reminders will tell you more about your week than any amount of planning will.
Keep reading
- Tasks and to-do listsWhere things are before they reach history.
- Reminder categoriesSort reminders into the parts of your life.
- Building a reminder habitTurning a record into a change.
- Timelee on the webThe easiest place to read a month of history.
- For medication adherenceWhether the dose was taken, answered properly.