Comment by derefr

> Reminders is not the job of a todo app, it is the job of a calendar app.

Ehh. The thing with a calendar "reminder" is that calendar apps assume that any such reminder is irrelevant once the time you set for the reminder goes by. They exist to remind you that some time-sensitive real-world event is starting, in time to be ready for it; but once that event has ended, you must have either done it or missed it — so either way, the calendar forgets about it.

Whereas a reminder / "todo with a date" object in a reminder/todo app, makes a different assumption: that you still need to do the thing, even if you didn't interact with the reminder when it first popped up. So the reminder is still there, glowing brightly, and often pops back up with further notifications, until you complete it.

Three examples from my own calendar of the type of reminder I'm talking about here, if you can't yet picture what I mean:

• It's time to replace the filter in my cat's water fountain [and take apart and scrub all the parts of the fountain while I'm at it.] (This isn't urgent — there's no particular need to do it exactly when I'm reminded of it — but it grows more urgent the longer it is left undone. The persistence of the reminder helps me to remember to do it, if I was busy when I first saw it.)

• I've gotta either pick the specific meals going into my meal-box subscription service box by midnight Saturday, or skip the week (or the service will pick randomly for me, giving me things I really don't want to eat, and I'll torture myself trying to motivate myself to cook those meals anyway, because I don't want to waste money/food.) I set this one to go off with two explicit "pre-notifications" twice — once at 7PM on Thursday, and again at 9PM on Friday. It then goes off again on its own, a little bit before midnight, and that's the final warning. (And, of course, if I check it off before then, the other notifications associated with that instance of the reminder won't fire.) I also usually just leave the Friday 9PM one unacknowledged + open as a toast on my computer until I've picked it, to ensure I won't get distracted and forget about it.

• Pay my credit card bill. (I have monthly autopay set up, but my understanding is that they still get to charge some minimal amount of interest for any charge that remains posted + not paid down for 21 days. So I set a reminder to pay the card down every 14 days. Again, not urgent per se — the worst that happens is that the 30-day autopay kicks in. But I find it a convenient time to review the last 14 days of charges for any strange activity; and the longer I go without doing that, the more of a schlep that starts to feel like — so biweekly is actually good here.

To be clear, I had all three of these set up as calendar events before — and they didn't work very well that way! Repeating reminders have much better semantics here.