What about a UI like this, one line for each of your goals:
Start reminding me __ days before derailing, at __:__, with a deadline of __:__
You could choose as much as 30 days lead time, but we’d probably default to 0 – emergency day reminders only. There’d be no way to turn off zeno polling, except to set your starting reminder to be like a minute before your deadline. (Of course the other answer to “you don’t want zeno polling?” is “then get your lazy self back on your dang road when the bot first eeps at you!”)
For consistency I think we’ll also want SMS reminders to use zeno polling (and maybe that will mean making SMS a premium feature).
Nitty Gritty and Open Questions:
- Zeno polling happens on the emergency day. Before that it’s just every day at the remind time, starting however many days before derailment. So if you want daily reminders, just set that to the max of 30 days. If you have more than 30 days of safety buffer then you won’t get reminded, which would serve as a reminder to dial up your yellow brick road! (The alternative is zeno-style by day, like at T minus 30 days, then T minus 15 days, then T minus 8 days, etc. But we’d still probably want to stick to the specified remind time until intra-day zeno polling started on the eep day.)
- Should you be able to choose both email and SMS, or is it either-or? And can you choose that per goal or only globally? It would also be really nice to centralize these choices between email, SMS, and the smartphone apps (or even all apps you have authorized).
- This proposal means dropping support for specifying what days of the week we can bug you when it’s not an eep or pre-eep day.
- We currently suppress reminders if you’ve already entered data for that day. I think that violates the anti-magic principle and we should just send them consistently. Otherwise it can seem like the bot is randomly flaking out.