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Send a reminder to someone else

Asking somebody to do something is easy. Knowing whether they have taken it on is the hard part, and a message in a chat thread will not tell you. Shared reminders give the request a state you can look at instead of a conversation you have to remember.

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Two colleagues looking at a smartphone together in an office

What happens to a request in a chat thread

The task was clear. The person was willing. The mechanism was a message, and a message has no memory of whether anything happened.

  • You do not know if they saw it

    A read receipt says the words arrived on a screen. It does not say anybody agreed to anything, and it certainly does not say they will still be thinking about it tomorrow.

  • It scrolled away

    Your request is now twelve messages up, between a photo and a link. Nobody deliberately ignored it. It simply stopped being visible in the place where it was sent.

  • You end up chasing

    The follow-up message is awkward for both of you, it costs you the mental energy of remembering to send it, and you have to send it again if the answer is vague.

  • Nothing rings at the right moment

    The request arrived on Monday. The thing needs doing on Thursday at 16:00. A chat message cannot bridge those three days, so it relies on the other person's memory.

How a shared reminder works

It is an ordinary reminder with somebody else's name on it. Four steps, and then there is a status rather than a hope.

  1. Create the reminder as normal

    Title, time, category, delivery channel, a note if the detail matters. Nothing about sharing changes the rest of the form.

  2. Share it with a person, or assign it in a team

    Share with one person directly, or group people into a team and assign it to a member. Teams are worth setting up when the same handful of people keep coming up.

  3. They accept or decline

    It arrives as a push notification on their phone. They take it on or they do not, and either answer is recorded — which makes declining a legitimate move rather than a silence.

  4. You see where it stands

    Pending, Accepted or Declined. You look at the status instead of asking, and if it is still Pending on Wednesday you know that before Thursday arrives.

Assigned and acknowledged are different things

Most tools that let you assign work treat sending as the end of the transaction. The item moves into somebody else's column and your side of it is finished, whether or not they have ever looked at it.

Recording an accept or a decline changes what the list means. An Accepted item is a commitment somebody has made. A Pending one is a question that has not been answered yet. A Declined one is information you needed, delivered early, rather than a surprise on the day.

For a household this is usually the difference between one person carrying every arrangement in their head and two people sharing it. For a team it is the difference between a task list and a status report you did not have to write.

  • Share with one person, or assign inside a team you create
  • Accept and decline are recorded, not assumed
  • Pending, Accepted and Declined are visible to the sender
  • The reminder rings on their phone at the time, not when you sent it
A smartphone showing a checklist in a kitchen

What a shared reminder can carry

Because it is a normal reminder underneath, everything that makes a reminder useful travels with it.

  • A whole list

    Share a bucket list and the other person gets the items, not a description of them. This is the shopping list that reaches whoever is actually passing the shop.

  • A photo

    The part number, the shelf, the form, the meter reading. A picture removes the two follow-up messages that a written instruction usually needs.

  • A voice note

    Thirty seconds of context is faster to record than to type, and it says the thing you actually mean rather than a compressed version of it.

  • A repeat

    For the recurring share — the Friday report, the weekend medication, the alternate-week collection — set the pattern once rather than sending it every time.

  • A priority

    Marking something Urgent tells the other person how to place it against everything else they are already holding.

  • A record afterwards

    Completed shared reminders go to history, which is how you answer questions about last month without anyone having to reconstruct it.

If they do not use Timelee, call them instead

A shared reminder arrives as a push notification, so the other person needs the Timelee app for it. When that is not the case — an older relative, a client, somebody who will never install anything — point a phone call reminder at their number instead. Timelee's servers will ring them at the time, and nothing has to be installed at their end. The number has to be verified by its owner with a one-time code first, which is why this cannot be used to make a stranger's phone ring.

Where sharing works

Where sharing works
FeatureAndroidiOSWeb
Share a reminder with a personYesYesYes
Create a team and assign to a memberYesYesYes
Receive the shared reminder as a pushYesYesNo
Accept or declineYesYesYes
Reach somebody who does not use TimeleeYesYesYes

The arranging is comfortable on a laptop. The ringing happens on a phone.

The work is not remembering the task. It is remembering who agreed to it.

A shared reminder holds both, and tells you which of the two is still missing.

Hand over the next thing you would otherwise chase

Pick one recurring arrangement you currently manage by messaging somebody, share it once, and let the status answer the question you would have asked.

Start with GoogleSetting reminders for someone else

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