Capture
Say it now, be reminded later
The moment you need to record something is rarely the moment you can type. A voice reminder takes the thought at full length, in your own words, and plays it back when the reminder rings.
Typing is lossy, and you do the losing
You have thirty seconds of context and a phone in one hand. What survives the typing is four words: call the surveyor. What you have actually lost is the reason you need to call them, the two questions you wanted to ask, and the thing the neighbour said that changed the answer.
So when the reminder fires on Thursday you get the title back and none of the thinking. You know you were supposed to call. You spend ten minutes rebuilding why, and half of it does not come back at all.
A voice reminder removes the compression step. You say the whole thing out loud, at the speed you think, and it is stored against the reminder instead of being reduced to a heading. The reminder still rings the way any other reminder rings. The difference is what you get when it does.
One clip, attached to the thing it belongs to
A voice reminder is not a separate recordings app that you then have to search. The clip belongs to the reminder. It is filed with the title, the time, the category and the delivery setting, and it plays from the reminder in the Timelee app when the reminder arrives.
That matters more than it sounds. Most voice memos fail not at recording but at retrieval: you have eleven untitled clips and no idea which is the one about the boiler. Here there is exactly one clip on exactly one reminder, and the reminder is what brings it back to you at the right time.
- One recording per reminder, so there is never a clip you cannot place
- Plays from the reminder in the app when it fires
- Keeps its title, category, tags and priority like any other reminder
- Stored with your account, so the phone that rings is not the only phone that has it
When a voice note is the right format
- You are driving, on a ladder, gloved, or carrying something in both hands
- The detail is longer than a title but not worth opening a form for
- You are quoting somebody and the exact wording matters
- You are describing a fault and the words for it do not exist yet
- You want tone as well as content — which of the two options you were actually leaning towards
- You are handing the thought to yourself at a moment when you will have no patience for reading
Set it up on a laptop. It rings on your phone.
Recording and playback belong to the phone, because the phone is the thing that is with you when the thought arrives and when the reminder lands. The Android and iOS apps are where a voice reminder is captured and where the clip plays back. On the web you can create the reminder, set its time, its category and how it reaches you, then let your phone do the part that needs a microphone in your hand.
What you can put around the clip
A voice note is one kind of detail. Timelee lets you stack the others on the same reminder rather than making you choose.
Photographs
Say what the problem is and photograph it at the same time. Several pictures can sit on the same reminder as the clip.
A written detail page
When the thought turns into a plan, open the reminder's detail page and write it up properly — formatted text, tables, even a drawing.
A delivery you cannot swipe away
If the call you recorded the note about is the one that cannot slip again, set it to escalate rather than to ring once.
Tags for the messy ones
Voice notes tend to be the untidiest things in a list. A tag like van or q3 makes a week of them retrievable as a group.
A place instead of a time
If the note is a question for somebody at a site, pin it to the site and let it arrive when you next turn in.
It stays after you are done
Completed voice reminders go to history with their clip, which is occasionally the only record of what you were told on a Tuesday.
Stop compressing the thought down to four words
Next time you catch yourself typing a title you know you will not understand on Thursday, say it instead.