Organisation
Sort reminders into the parts of your life
Open a reminder list at 09:15 on a Monday and the first thing you see is a dentist appointment, a client deadline and a note about cat food, in that order. Reminder categories exist so that the list you are looking at is the part of your life you are currently in.
What a single undivided list does to you
The list is not wrong. It contains everything you asked it to contain. That is the problem.
Work bleeds into the evening
You check the list at 21:00 to see whether the bins go out, and you read four work items on the way past. Now you are thinking about a deadline instead of the bins.
You cannot see the size of anything
Forty items in one list is a number. Nine work, six home, four medical and twenty-one shopping is a picture. Only one of those tells you where the pressure actually is.
Everything competes with everything
A client callback and buying washing-up liquid sit in the same column with the same weight, so the list stops helping you choose and starts just being long.
Seven categories come built in
They cover most of an ordinary week, and each one carries its own colour so a glance at the list tells you what kind of day it is before you have read a word.
Work and Office
Two separate ideas on purpose. Work is the job itself; Office is the building and the admin around it — the parking permit, the fire drill, the printer contract.
Meeting
Everything with another person's time attached to it, which is the set you most often need to see on its own the night before.
Personal
The appointments, renewals and errands that belong to you rather than to a household or an employer.
Grocery and Shopping
Kept apart because they behave differently: groceries are a recurring list you build from a catalogue, shopping is a set of one-off purchases.
Home
The boiler service, the bins, the thing in the loft. The category that is invisible until it is three weeks overdue.
Anything you add yourself
Create your own categories with their own colours — a client name, a side project, a course, a relative you help look after.
Filter to one category and the counts follow
The Timelee dashboard groups your reminders by day: Overdue, Today, Tomorrow, Later This Week and Later, each with a live count on the tab. Filter to one category and every one of those counts recalculates to match.
That is the part that makes categories worth the ten seconds of setup. "Six overdue" is a vague feeling of being behind. "Six overdue, five of them Home" is a Saturday morning with a clear job in it.
It also works the other way round. Filter to Work on a Monday and the four personal things you cannot do until Thursday stop occupying space in the decision.
- Live counts on Overdue, Today, Tomorrow, Later This Week and Later
- Every count recalculates when you filter to a category
- Each category carries its own colour in the list
- The same categories are there on Android, iPhone and the web
Setting up categories without overthinking them
The common mistake is building a taxonomy. Categories are containers, not a filing system, and five good ones beat twenty precise ones.
Start with the ones you already switch between
Not the areas of your life in the abstract — the ones you genuinely need to look at separately. For most people that is work, home, and one other thing.
Add a category only when a filter would help
If you would never look at a list of only these items, it does not need to be a category. It probably needs to be a tag instead.
Give related things the same colour logic
Keep the loud colours for the categories with consequences. If everything is red, the list has told you nothing.
Put new reminders in one as you create them
Categorising later never happens. It takes one tap in the form, and it is the tap that makes every filter afterwards useful.
Signs your categories are working
- You open a filtered view more often than the full list
- The overdue count in one category makes obvious sense — and the others are near zero
- You can look at the list in the evening without reading anything about work
- A new reminder gets a category without you thinking about it
- Nothing sits in a category called Other for more than a week
A list that shows you everything has made you responsible for everything at once.
Categories are not tidiness. They are the difference between looking at your whole life and looking at the part of it you can act on now.
Put this week's reminders into three categories
Work, home, and whichever third thing is currently taking up room. Then filter to one and see how much shorter the day looks.
Keep reading
- Reminder tagsThe second axis, for things a category cannot hold.
- Reminder prioritiesFour levels, and what each should mean.
- Organising with categories and tagsA system that survives a busy month.
- Tasks and to-do listsThe list these categories are dividing.
- Bucket listsWhere the Grocery category earns its place.