When the scholars in my class need help remembering things I often advise them to set a reminder on their iPads. It's a strategy that I use myself, admittedly with varying degrees of success. Most recently, I set an hourly reminder when my homeroom and I were trying to learn the Pledge of Allegiance in ASL. Whenever my watch chimed, I paused to practice the signs. Well, most of the time, and definitely enough to become pretty familiar with the gestures.
A few days later, I reset the app to remind me to practice daily, but I must have tapped something wrong, because I started getting 2 reminders every hour. Even so, it's easy enough to ignore them, although that does defeat the purpose.
A few months ago, I set a daily reminder to "Plan the big 6-0" so that I would stop procrastinating on finding and finalizing a place for our family to gather at the end of June this year. It gave me a bit of pause, though, when Siri read the reminder out loud. Plan the big six-nil, she intoned, reading my coming age as the score of a soccer match or something. What does that even mean?
Probably the oldest, continuous reminder I have on my phone is from the summer of 2018. Then, my mom gave my a gift certificate to a restaurant downtown. Reservations were notoriously elusive, opening at midnight on the first for the month to come, and I set a daily reminder to try to book it. "Did you get one?" Mom would ask when we talked, but I never did. Six months later, my mom got sick and our time and attention were otherwise occupied. And then she died, the pandemic came, and, well.
I don't even have the gift certificate anymore; I have no idea where it went. But every now and then? I still get a reminder to make that reservation.
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