Friday, April 14, 2006
HassleMe vs ReminderFeed
byI’m forgetful. There I’ve admitted it. That’s the first step to recovery isn’t it? To-do lists have never really worked for me, so when I found two sites that offered to remember things for me I figured I had nothing to lose. The worst that could happen is that I’d forget to use them and be in no worse of a spot than I was before.
HassleMe works by adding a bit of randomness to the equation. One thing I found when I set my calendar to remind me to do things I’d get the same alert everyday at the same time. That just didn’t work, it was too easy to ignore it because I knew I’d get the same one tomorrow at the same time. Hassle me asks you roughly how often you’d like to be hassled and handles the rest. Tell it you want to call your mom roughly every five days and you will start getting email at all times of the day, usually about five days apart. I’ve been using HassleMe for a few weeks and I have to be honest, it is helping me be more organized.
ReminderFeed as you might guess uses an RSS feed to keep you on your toes rather than email. You can set a start and end date but you’re only choice is to get daily reminders. This limits the usefulness of ReminderFeed but I could see it working for certain things. Particularly if you spend most of your time in your RSS reader anyway, like a reminder to post to your blog (speaking of which I should set up for myself!). One nice thing about ReminderFeed is you give each reminder a link. A reminder to post to your blog can include the link right, a one-stop reminder service. I haven’t used ReminderFeed as much as HassleMe but I think it would work really good for those daily things that I sometimes “forget” to do.
HassleMe and ReminderFeed are two of the better reminder apps that I’ve found but I’m sure there are plenty of others. If you know of a good service let me know, I’d love to try it out. I need all the help I can get.
