Eventually Free

Sometimes, there are tasks that are not very urgent and critical, but that you still don't want to forget: bring the car to the tune up, descale your coffee maker, go to the dentist's check etc. How do you remind yourself of such tasks? Setting an alarm in your calendar doesn't really do the trick: when it goes off and you can't do the task right then (because it's a bad time), you have to find a way to postpone the reminder. So you either set a new alarm in your calendar (which will probably go off at a bad time again), or you resort to some old fashioned way, such as sticking a paper note to your fridge door (which is what you wanted to avoid in the first place, because the fridge door will not send you any reminders, and the sticky note might fall off...).

This app provides a way to gently remind you of such non-urgent tasks: when a task becomes due (= a reminder is "activated"), a notification icon is shown on your device (without a tone): this tells you that one or more such tasks are currently pending; the app shows you which ones. Unlike with a calendar alarm, you don't need to respond immedately to the reminder: the notification icon will just sit there until all pending tasks are accomplished. If it bothers you too much and you know that the tasks can indeed wait, you may dismiss the notification icon for a certain time (typically for some days). It will reappear after the specified time, or when another reminder is activated in the meantime. As soon as you have accomplished a task, you can dismiss it; when no reminders are pending anymore, the notification icon will disappear. Optionally, you can turn off the notification icon alltogether, in case you plan to regularly check the due list, anyway.

In addition to the list with the pending reminders, the app can also show you a list of all upcoming reminders, sorted by date. This way you can quickly get an overview of what's coming up in the future.

Reminders can be set up in the following ways:

- Absolute times: on specific weekdays (e.g., every Tuesday and Friday), on specific days within any month (e.g., on the 5th and on the last day of each month), or on specific dates within any year (e.g., on August 1 and December 25 each year).

- Interval, "strict": the reminder becomes due in regular intervals, e.g., every 180 days. "Strict" means that the interval is always followed exactly, no matter how long you wait until you dismiss a pending reminder. For example, if you set the interval to 30 days, and you dismiss a task only after it's been pending for 20 days, the interval is still followed exactly, i.e., the reminder will become pending a mere 10 days later.

- Interval, "restart": the date when the reminder is activated depends on when you dismissed it the last time. This is ideal for regular tasks where there's no need to "catch up" if you have delayed accomplishing it. For example, say you generally want to see your dentist once a year, so you set the interval to 365 days. Now, when the reminder becomes due, you still wait for 2 months before actually seeing the dentist. After that visit, there's no need to "compensate" for the 2 months delay by scheduling your next visit after 10 months time. Instead, you can wait---as normal---for a full year before your next visit. This is the idea behind the "restart" type of reminder.

- One time only: this reminder ist activated only once, at a specified date. When you've accomplished the task, you can choose to either delete the reminder or to merely disabled it (so you might later re-use it for a different date).