Background
Reminders Are the Strongest
You might be struggling with managing your tasks, and the most powerful tool you can use is reminders. Task lists become obsolete quickly, and calendars, while essential for managers or executives whose jobs revolve around meetings, often fall short for engineers.
For engineers, reminders are the only savior. This is because once you've set a reminder, it will alert you even if you're deeply focused. For example, you won't forget about meetings or outings.
"Don't calendars have a reminder feature?"
Yes, they do. Which is why reminders are great, right? Think about the opposite scenario—a calendar without reminders… I'd be too scared of missing things to fully concentrate on my work.
Reminders Are Cumbersome
However, reminders can be a burden. With a task list, especially one that's plain text-based, you just jot down a line, and you're done. But reminders are different. You likely have to open a GUI calendar and fiddle with various screens to set them up. It's quite tedious, isn't it?
The Curse of Reactive Work
By the way, I've coined a concept called Reactive Work. As the name suggests, it involves working in a reactive manner: responding to Slack notifications, answering when someone speaks to you, attending meetings because they've been scheduled—it's a work style many busy individuals fall into. While it suits surviving a hectic pace, it's inappropriate for tackling creatively challenging problems.
However, the truth may be that working in another way is not feasible for many.
Even talented engineering managers or staff engineers find it hard to escape reactive work. Of course, such people might not always tackle complex problems effectively. They're good at solving pesky or time-consuming issues quickly, and there's value in that, but that's about it.
As a Knowledge Architect, I often work on breaking free from reactive work, but honestly, it's tough. I predict that AI might replace mid-level engineers entirely before people manage to escape reactive work. That's how challenging it is.
Balancing Reactive Work and Creativity
Given this situation, I've shifted my perspective to focus on how I can rely on reactive work while ensuring room for creativity instead of being purely reactive.
After looking into reminders, I've finally found an answer I'd like to share.
Tasks You Can Defer
Continuous Reminding refers to managing tasks that can be deferred, utilizing reminders to do so. We call this type of reminder a Coremind.
Example and Before/After
As an example, let's say you'd like to tackle Task A in about three hours. You set a reminder. When the three hours pass and you're reminded of Task A, you find yourself in a bind and feel like saying, "Could I do it in 20 minutes?" What should you do?
Let's first analyze the "Before" scenario. Traditionally, you'd be stuck resetting that "cumbersome reminder" again. Or, you might manage to muster the energy for just Task A, but what if you had two such tasks? Or three? You'd undoubtedly fail to get started, and subsequently, forget Task A!
Now, onto the "After" scenario. What happens when you use Coremind? It's simple: you just pick the "remind me in 20 minutes" option that the reminder offers. This is all it takes to immediately extend the Task A reminder by 20 minutes.
Of course, you'll be reminded again in 20 minutes, at which point you can instantly decide again—whether it's 5 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, or even tomorrow. Or you might think, "I don't need to do it anymore, so discard it."
🔧 I Created a Prototype
Please give it a try.
- Prototype
- GitHub
- 👉️ https://github.com/stakiran/continuous_reminding
- Created with Cline, in Japanese
To quickly check how it operates, reminders can only be set for 1 to 60 seconds later, and if unspecified, they remind you 3 seconds later. Thanks to this, you can quickly get a feel for Coremind.
A Future with Dozens of Reminders
Suppose we manage to achieve continuous reminding.
We'll likely end up with dozens of Coreminds because since we can defer things based on our intuition, the pace of reminders will gradually converge into a balanced state.
Low-priority tasks will be pushed further away, while others will be reminded repeatedly. You can intuitively reflect the changes in priority. You might decide to postpone something to three hours later rather than 20 minutes, or even push it to the next day. Of course, as long as they are embedded as reminders, you won't forget them. In fact, even if you do forget, reminders will help you remember.
Continuous reminding follows the path of reactive work. You set reminders and respond to what you're reminded of. That's all it takes to keep things running smoothly.
Setting up numerous Coreminds and balancing them feels like nurturing reminders as if they were pets. I like to call this growing reminders. Reminders are living entities. This approach is neither a task list nor a calendar—it's a third paradigm entirely.
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