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Snooze that you control, not the other way round

Snooze is the most used button in any reminder app and the least thought about. Nine minutes, chosen by an alarm clock manufacturer decades ago, applied to everything from a stretch break to a dose of medication. Timelee's reminder snooze settings are set per reminder instead.

Start with GoogleSee the escalating delivery channels
A hand pressing the snooze button on a phone alarm

Snooze is a decision you are making without noticing

Every time you snooze something you are making a small forecast: in ten minutes I will be better placed to do this than I am now. Sometimes that is true. In the morning, standing in a kitchen, it is almost never true, and the forecast is really just a way of making the noise stop.

The trouble is that one snooze length is applied to everything. Ten minutes is a sensible gap for a stretch break and a meaningless one for a reminder to leave for the airport. A day would be right for a reminder to call the bank and absurd for a reminder to take a tablet.

Setting the snooze length on the reminder, rather than on the app, turns a reflex back into a decision — one you make once, calmly, at the moment you create the thing.

How a default snooze quietly loses things

Nothing here involves forgetting. In each case you actively interacted with the reminder, and it still did not get done.

  • Ten minutes was never enough

    You are on a call, in a queue, or halfway through something with a knife in your hand. Ten minutes later you are in exactly the same position, so you snooze again, and the reminder becomes a sound rather than a task.

  • The snooze outlived the window

    An appointment you could still have made at 14:10 cannot be made at 15:30. Some reminders have a window, and a snooze that is longer than the window has silently converted the reminder into a notification of failure.

  • Nobody counted

    There is no record of the four times you pushed something back this morning, so the habit is invisible to you. It only surfaces at the point where the thing has definitively not happened.

A snooze length that belongs to the reminder

Timelee lets you set the snooze on each reminder: 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, a day, or a custom number of minutes if none of those match.

The custom option matters more than it sounds. Real gaps are not round numbers. A reminder that needs to come back after the meeting comes back in 47 minutes. A reminder to check on something in the oven comes back in 12.

The most useful setting, though, is Off. Some reminders should not be snoozeable at all, and until an app lets you say so, every reminder is negotiable — which means, in practice, that none of them are binding.

  • Eight preset lengths, from 5 minutes to a whole day
  • A custom length in minutes for the gaps that are not round
  • Off, for the reminder that must not be pushed back
  • Stored on the reminder, so one change does not affect the rest
A hand selecting an option on a smartphone settings screen

The controls around snooze

Snooze is one of four settings that decide how insistent a reminder is. They are worth setting together, because each one can undo another.

  • Snooze length

    How long the reminder goes away for when you push it back. Choose it to match the real interruption, not the default nine minutes you inherited from an alarm clock.

  • Auto snooze

    The reminder re-rings a set number of times on its own and then stops, without you touching it. Useful when you want a few automatic attempts and a definite end.

  • Nag

    The opposite end of the same idea: the reminder keeps coming back on an interval until you mark it done, rather than stopping after a fixed count.

  • Delivery channel

    Snoozing a banner is trivial. Snoozing a full-screen ring is a deliberate act. Pairing a short snooze with a louder channel is what makes the setting bite.

How to choose a snooze length

Three questions, answered at the moment you create the reminder rather than at the moment it rings.

  1. Does this have a window?

    If the thing can only be done between now and a specific later time, the snooze must be shorter than the window. A dose, a collection, a shop that closes — all of these have hard edges.

  2. What is realistically interrupting me?

    Set the snooze to the length of the interruption you actually expect: the rest of the call, the rest of the journey, the rest of the meeting. Not to a number that sounds tidy.

  3. Should this be snoozeable at all?

    For two or three reminders a week, the answer is no. Set those to Off and pair them with a channel you cannot swipe away, and they will get done.

Off is the setting most people never look for

Almost every reminder app treats snooze as a permanent right. Timelee treats it as an option you can withdraw for a particular reminder. If you take one thing from this page, make it this: find the two reminders in your week where snoozing has actually cost you something, and set those two to Off.

Set snooze on the next reminder you create

It takes one tap while you are already in the form, and it is the difference between a reminder you negotiate with and one you act on.

Start with GoogleHow to stop snoozing your alarm

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