Let’s say you have a dentist appointment next Tuesday at 3 PM, so you configure the software to send you a reminder email at 2:30.Then, if you’re anything like me, on the day of the appointment the reminder note arrives in your inbox and you dismiss it almost thoughtlessly, saying to yourself “Oh yeah. The dentist. I’ll get up and go in a second, as soon as I finish debugging this one function.”
The next time you blink your eyes, it’s eight o’clock in the evening. Not only have you missed your dentist appointment, but also your dinner.
When I’m in the zone, it’s hard to snap out of that reverie, so those online appointment reminder services don’t work very well for me.
But what if I could tell the software to send me a barrage of notifications? [...] That would probably get my attention, and I’d probably make it to my dentist appointment.
I know there are a zillion reminder services out there. But what if there was another one, capable of ridiculous, incessant pestering?
(from http://benjismith.net/index.php/2006/07/12/biz-idea-16-incessant-pestering/)
Important: Here I do not speak of simple reminders. I speak of pestering (or nagging, or snooze) reminders. It’s different! Don’t think that you can use Google Calendar or Remember the Milk to have the same feature!
Pestering: a killer feature
I am a nostalgic fan of the (imho) wonderful PingMe reminder web service, which unfortunately has been discontinued by Zemetic company last spring, due to overwhelming difficulties outlined in this blog post.
After PingMe shut down I had to look for a valid alternative among the many other free web reminder services. Apparently, this did seem a simple task, even because I was interested only in email reminders and I hadn’t other very sophisticated needs. Still I really missed a feature I can’t live without and that I have found only in PingMe service: the support for pestering reminder, which is a reminder repeatedly sent at given intervals until it is explicitily turn off (in PingMe this could be done in a very simple way by replying “done” or “ok” to the pestering email reminder).
For me pestering support is absolutely useful, since I am a very absent-minded person: I tend to forgive every to-do note just after few minutes I read it and therefore I really need nagging advices to stop only after having done the to-do job.
Why a DIY reminder?
Since, as I have already pointed out, I was not able to find any reminder service that supports pestering alarms, I have decided to build it by myself. My initial wish was to have a fully email-driven reminder system which would have allowed to create, edit and delete reminder entries directly by email message send as in PingMe and other reminder web services. On the other hand, after bailing out some other ideas, I have realized that the great facility of Google docs, even not allowing identical operating ways, has all I need to easily make a convenient personal email reminder system with pestering support and email integration:
- a database to put and organize all reminder tasks (by a spreadsheet);
- a way to interact with the database to stop pestering (by a form);
- a procedure to check reminder deadlines and handle stop pestering commands (by some script triggers).
