Long-term reminders

Published on November 22, 2019

By long-term reminders I mean things that are not actionable right now, but at some point in the future become important to take care of: cancel a subscription or a credit card, renew a passport/visa/driver’s license etc.

At one point I used nudgemail for this. However, I ran into a pretty serious date parsing/scheduling bug: I had two reminders, one for October 6 and one for October 20, and both arrived on October 1. I never received a response to the email I sent to support@nudgemail.com, so I don’t consider them reliable anymore.

That got me thinking: what is a reliable way to send a message to the future me?

Email reminders seem perfect for this, if only there existed a service that has proved to be dependable (I’m not aware of one).
Telegram allows to schedule messages in the future and send them to oneself. But since telegram is tied to my phone number, there is a high chance that in a year or two I’ll have a different phone number and will lose my reminder.
There are probably many mobile apps for this, but then I need to remember to transfer them to any new phone I may have.
I considered writing or installing an existing self-hosted email scheduling solution, but it would become a maintenance burden.
I also considered doing it UNIX-way, using atd and mail, but:
- What if I forget to transfer my atd files to the next system/device?
- How to ensure reliable delivery of mail from localhost? (I don’t set up smtpd/smarthosts these days.)

Here’s what I decided in the end, inspired by the birthday program:

I write my reminders in a simple text file structured like this:
```
YYYY-MM-DD<tab>description
```
For instance:
```
2021-01-03   Renew ro-che.info
```
I wrote a small Haskell program that parses the file and prints any reminders that are due.
I added remind ~/my/reminders.txt to ~/.zshrc.

I figured that in several years I’ll still be using terminals and zsh, and I tend to back up and transfer these files to new systems, so this is one of the most reliable way to send a message to the future for me.