Use case

Reminders for a brain that swipes notifications away

You did not ignore it. You meant to do it in a minute, and the minute never arrived. The intention was real, you can still remember having it, and the task is exactly where you left it.

Start with Google Why you ignore notifications

A man staring off, his phone lighting up unnoticed on the desk

A reminder that fires once is a test of working memory

Most reminder apps make the same design assumption: that the gap between seeing a prompt and acting on it is approximately zero. A banner appears, you read it, you do the thing. One delivery is therefore enough.

For a lot of people that gap is not zero. It is a minute, and then it is the rest of the afternoon, because something in the minute took the attention and the intention went with it. Nothing about that is a failure of wanting to. The reminder was delivered to a moment when you could not act, and then it deleted itself.

A reminder app for ADHD has to survive that gap rather than test it. That means arriving more than once, arriving in a form that interrupts rather than decorates, and staying visible until the thing is actually marked done. All three of those are settings in Timelee rather than habits you have to build.

Four places the intention leaks out

You will recognise at least three of these, and probably all four from this week.

In a minute
You saw it, you agreed with it, you put it down for sixty seconds and it was gone. The reminder had one job and it did it, once, at exactly the wrong moment.
The reflex swipe
Your thumb cleared the banner before you had finished reading the second word. It was not a decision. It is the same gesture you have made ten thousand times on advertising.
Capture that stalls
The thought arrives fully formed, you open the app, there is a form with eight fields, and by field three the thought is gone and the form is abandoned.
The flat list
Forty items, no shape, all the same size. Opening it costs more than ignoring it, so you ignore it, and the two genuinely urgent ones drown with the rest.

The settings that do the work

None of these are motivational. They are mechanical, they are switched on per reminder, and they change what happens when you do not respond.

Pinch Me, so it comes back
Timelee's nag setting re-rings instead of firing once: every minute, 5, 15 or 30 minutes, hourly or daily. The 15- and 30-minute settings repeat six times and stop. Every Minute and Every Day keep going until you mark it done.
App Call, so you read it first
The phone rings full screen, like an incoming call, inside Timelee. You still dismiss it with a tap, but you look at a ringing screen before you do, and that is a different gesture from the reflex swipe.
Pre-alarms, for anything with a departure time
The problem is rarely the appointment. It is starting to leave. Put a pre-alarm thirty minutes before the thing itself, which is when the decision actually has to be made.
Snooze you can switch off
Snooze is set per reminder and one of the options is Off. For the two things a week that must not be pushed, take the escape hatch away in advance, while you are calm.
Quick add, so capture never stalls
Type one line and press Enter. Add !high for priority, #tag for a tag and @work for a category on the same line. No form, no decisions, no lost thought.
Focus mode, one thing at a time
A keyboard run through the list that shows a single reminder at a time. Enter marks it done, S skips, Esc leaves, and it counts what you cleared.

Escalation is a response to silence. Answer the first alert and nothing else happens.

This matters more here than anywhere else on the site. The point is not to be loud at you all day. It is that a reminder you did not respond to is treated as unfinished rather than as delivered.

Give the list a shape you can open

A list you cannot bear to open is not a list. Timelee's dashboard puts three counts at the top — Overdue, Today, Completed — and five tabs under them with live counts: Overdue, Today, Tomorrow, Later This Week, Later. You can see the size of the problem before you open it, which is usually smaller than the version in your head.

Switch to the priority view and the same reminders regroup into First, Then and Later instead of by date. Four levels only help if each one means something, so use Urgent sparingly enough that it keeps meaning something.

Filter to one category and every count recalculates. Work on a Tuesday afternoon is a shorter and much more approachable list than everything you have ever agreed to do.

Overdue is its own tab, so it stops being a silent pile mixed into today
Priority view regroups the same list into First, Then and Later
Completed items go to History, so finishing things leaves a visible trace

A woman arranging colourful sticky notes on a wall planner

A setup worth trying for one week

Put everything on quick add, in one line each, without opening a form
Leave most reminders on a plain alarm — if everything escalates, nothing does
Pick three recurring things and set Pinch Me to every 30 minutes, which repeats six times
Put a 30-minute pre-alarm on anything you have to travel to
Set snooze to Off on exactly two reminders, and only two
Use App Call for the daily things you most often clear without reading
Spend fifteen minutes in Focus mode rather than an hour reorganising the list
At the end of the week, look at History rather than at what is left

What this page is not

Timelee is a reminder app. It is not a treatment, a therapy, a diagnostic tool or a medical device, and nothing here is clinical advice. Executive function is not a motivation problem and an app cannot fix it. What software can reasonably do is narrower and still useful: reduce what capture costs, deliver a prompt more than once, and make the prompt harder to clear by reflex. If you are considering treatment or support, that is a conversation for a clinician.

Common questions

Is this not just going to be annoying?

It would be if you set everything to the loudest option, so do not. The app's own default is App Call and most of your reminders should sit on a plain alarm. The loud channels work precisely because they are rare — two or three things a week, not forty.

What is Pinch Me, exactly?

It is Timelee's name for a nag setting. Instead of ringing once, the reminder re-rings on an interval: every minute, 5, 15 or 30 minutes, hourly or daily. The 5, 15, 30-minute and hourly settings repeat six times and then stop. Every Minute and Every Day keep going until you mark the reminder done.

I dismiss alarms in my sleep. Can I stop myself snoozing?

Snooze is set per reminder and one of the options is Off, so the reminder that must not be snoozed cannot be. You can also stack a second reminder a few minutes later on a different channel, which is harder to clear in the same reflex.

Will a phone call actually help, or is it just louder?

It is a different channel rather than a louder one. Timelee's servers place a real call on the phone network, so it rings with the app closed, the phone locked, or the handset in another room. Whether that helps you is worth testing on one reminder before deciding.

I have tried a dozen apps and abandoned all of them. Why would this be different?

It might not be, and we would rather say so. The honest difference is narrow: what happens when you do not respond. If your problem is that you never capture things, a different app will not fix that either. If your problem is that you capture them and the single notification does not survive the gap, that specific part is what escalation and Pinch Me address.

Try it with one reminder this week

Take the thing you have now put off four days running. Set it with Pinch Me on 30 minutes and snooze off, and see whether the sixth ring is the one that does it.

Start with Google Building a reminder habit