this might be too niche of a request to ever get implemented, but i’ll give it a shot anyway: i would love it if i could get reminders via telegram!
background:
i just read through Reminders - Beeminder Help again and this part made me stop and think for a bit:
We really think most people should keep reminders on! Beeminder isn’t terribly effective if you’re able to easily forget about your goal, so we try to make that a difficult task.
this makes sense! i’m starting to wonder if my huge number of derailments (compared to other people, if some forum posts are any indication) are in (small) part due to me not getting enough reminders about my goals … i do look at the state of all/most of my goals probably at least once every day, but whenever i do that, i do it because it’s at a convenient time for me, and it doesn’t really/always/necessarily lead to me then actually Doing The Thing (if the Thing needs to Be Done urgently).
so i think maybe more frequent reminders might be useful for me? or maybe i’m just using “the current reminder options aren’t ideal for me” as an excuse for my akrasia.
why i don’t currently have any reminders set on my goals
- i feel like i already get too many emails. i don’t always check my emails 24/7. i often go days now without opening my emails on my laptop. (i open work-related emails at work every day, i’m just talking about my private email adress here, the one i use for beeminder.) i do see all new incoming ones on my phone periodically, but i like to instantly deal with them or dismiss them or ignore them for later, whenever i see them on my laptop again. currently, i only get the “about to derail” beeminder reminders via email.
- even if i had beeminder reminders set up via email, i suspect they wouldn’t be terribly effective? i guess i’d only know if i tried! (but since i don’t have my mail program as one of the few apps enabled in the power-saving-mode on my phone, which is kind of my default phone-mode, i wouldn’t get them as soon as they arrive, anyway …)
- i never really tried android notifications. the thing is, i would need to have beeminder as one of a few select apps in my power-saving-mode on my phone, so that it works permanently and could send me reminders even when i have most other apps deactivated. i guess this is something i could try? not too keen on having Yet Another app permanently in my power-saving-mode, though …
- i’m not techy enough for slack or webhook reminders
- even if i had a beemium subscription, i’m not in the usa, so i couldn’t use sms reminders. (also my phone is mostly very weird about not really displaying incoming sms notifications, so this probably wouldn’t be of great use to me either way!)
why telegram reminders would work perfectly for me (in theory)
- telegram is already one of the few apps i have access to even when the power-saving-mode is enabled on my phone.
- i check it during various times each day, not just when it would be “convenient” for me to think about beeminder goals. (so a reminder could catch me at a time where i wouldn’t otherwise think of doing anything about the goal.)
- unlike email, opening telegram for me doesn’t equal “open/reply to everything”—currently i have 9 unread telegram messages from one chat, but i can still open the app and write stuff in other chats, or reply to other groups. with email, i always have the urge to deal with everything that’s new since the last few days, so beeminder reminders would get buried under a bunch of other stuff, and probably end up being ignored/deleted way too often (i love to delete/ignore emails when i can’t immediately deal with them) … i can’t really explain it properly, but my
akraticheart tells me that beeminder reminders would have a better chance of reaching me on telegram than they would via email.:p