8 advanced ways to manage reminders in Android

Your Android phone has some surprisingly smart systems for helping you remember things.

Google has got some incredibly useful ways to set yourself reminders in different areas of Android. Most of them are options you’d never even encounter if you didn’t know where to look, but once you uncover them these tips be invaluable.

1. THE SPOKEN TASK-SAVER

We’ll start with the simplest Android reminder option of all, but one that’s still out of sight and easy to forget. This is the Google Assistant-connected ability to set yourself a reminder and have it land within the Google Tasks service.

This one’s a little confusing, as up until recently, Assistant had its own independent reminders system, but Google switched that system out for one built into Tasks instead.

The way it works is still the same, though: no matter what you’re doing on your device – or even if your screen is off – you say “Hey Google” to get your phone’s attention. (If that doesn’t do anything, dig into your system settings to find the Assistant section and make sure you’ve got voice activation enabled.) Then simply say: “Remind me”, followed by what it is you want to remember and when.

Your reminder will then pop back up on your phone when the appropriate day and time arrives.

2. TOTAL NOTE RECALL

In addition to the Assistant-integrated Tasks reminder set-up, you can also set reminders within the Google Keep Android app – and in addition to allowing you to trigger your memory around a longer, more complex note or list, the Keep-set reminders have a helpful hidden possibility.

Keep reminders are the one type of Android reminder that currently support location-based firing. That means you can tell your phone to remind you about something the second you set foot in a specific physical spot – your office, a client’s business or a supermarket.

Suffice it to say, the productivity possibilities stemming from that are spectacular. From reminding yourself about a security code at an office complex to showing yourself pertinent agenda information at a particular meeting, you can take your reminders up a notch by attaching them to a place instead of just a date and time.

Keep also supports the basic date and time reminders, so you’ve got plenty of options. All you’ve got to do is start a new note or open up any existing note within Keep on your phone and look for the little bell icon in its upperright corner. Tap that, and you’ll be able to choose from a date or place reminder and then set it as you see fit.

3. THE EMAIL NO-FAIL

Email is a never-ending land mine of opportunities for overlooked obligations and response expectations. And even if you’ve got the best app imaginable for staying on top of your inbox, it’s all too easy to occasionally miss something and fail to respond when the time is right.

That’s where your email app’s snooze function – which is basically a glorified form of reminding – comes into play.

Email snoozing makes it easy to send any message out of your inbox and have it come back at a specific future date and time. It’s a productivity master’s secret weapon for maintaining a tidy inbox and making sure nothing important slips through the cracks.

In the Gmail Android app, you can find the snooze option by tapping the three-dot menu icon in the upper-right corner of the screen while viewing any email – or after pressing and holding an email to select it in your main inbox view. Most other Android email apps have a similar snoozing function somewhere, so if you aren’t using Gmail, poke around a bit in your email app of choice to see if you can find either a plain-text ‘snooze’ option or something resembling a clock or a calendar.

4. THE MESSAGE MEMENTO MACHINE

This next Android reminder system is one of my favourites, but it comes with a caveat: for many of us, it’s currently and inexplicably missing in action.

This has happened before, though, and the option has returned. So with

any luck, its partial disappearance now is more of a glitch than any deliberate removal, and we’ll all have it back in front of us before long.

The option of which we speak is a simple reminders system for the Google Messages app on Android. When present, it gives you a delightfully quick and easy way to create a reminder for any specific message in your texting inbox: you just press and hold the individual message, then tap the clock icon that pops up in the upper-right corner of the screen.

From there, it’s a few more taps to select exactly when you want that reminder to rear up and demand your attention – a perfect way to ensure you never forget to respond to something, even if it arrives at an inopportune time.

Even now, while that option is vexingly missing for many of us, you can still set a reminder via an incoming message’s notification on your phone. It’s currently limited only to one-hour, but with any luck, the full Messages reminder system will reappear for all of us before long.

5. THE IMAGE MEMORY GENIE

One of the newest, still-on-its-way-into-our-lives Android reminder possibilities lies within the always-excellent Google Photos app. It may or may not be available for you just yet, but it’s rolling out as we speak – and it promises to be a useful new addition to our Android reminders arsenal.

It’s a built-in option for setting reminders related to specific screenshots or images directly from your phone’s photo gallery. You’ll simply look for the reminder-creating option beneath any image that shows something time-sensitive – a ticket, a flyer about some upcoming event, whatever – and Photos will pop up a panel right then and there for you to whip up a reminder around it.

When the time arrives, you’ll then get a notification from the Android Calendar app letting you know you need to revisit that image.

6. THE CONTACT MEMORY-JOGGER

Google’s Android Contacts app has a handy new feature for making sure you never forget an important occasion, such as a birthday or anniversary. This app is not the same as the Contacts app installed on Samsung phones by default, but it is available – and highly advisable – to download and start using on any Android device.

Once you’ve got it, just open up the Google Contacts app on your phone, then open up any individual contact

within your list. Tap the three-dot menu icon in the upper-right corner of the screen, and you’ll see an option called ‘Reminders’. Tap it, and you can then set as many reminders as you want for important dates related to that specific person. You can tell your phone to remind you each and every year on the day of the occasion as well as two days, a week and two weeks before, if you want to be ready.

7. YOUR LOCATION SAVER

Perhaps the greatest life-saver of all is your Android phone’s deeply buried system for saving any location, anytime, and then bringing it back to your attention down the road.

The system is built into the Google Maps app on Android, and it’s technically designed for helping you remember a parking spot. But you can also use it to remind yourself of any physical place and then help yourself navigate back to it later in the day.

Just open up Maps and tap the little blue circle representing your current location. That’ll pull up an info panel at the bottom of the screen, and one of the first options within it should be a white button with the words ‘Save parking’. (If you don’t see that button, you might need to scroll horizontally on the line with ‘Share location’ to reveal it.)

Tap it and your current location will be saved and accessible within the Maps app itself as well as within a reminder in your standard system notification panel. All that’s left is to tap that notification when you need it, and Maps will zip right back that location and help you navigate your way back to it – no matter how far you’ve roamed.

8. THE ALL-PURPOSE NOTIFICATION REMINDER

Some Android notifications, such as the location reminder we just went over, don’t have their own built-in time system – to make them go away and

then return at a specific point in the future. But remember, Android itself allows you to snooze any notification and essentially treat it like a reminder. That means it’ll show back up and grab your attention in 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour or two hours, depending on your preference.

It’s a great way to guarantee you remember something that pops up in your notifications at an awkward moment, when you’re in the midst of something else and likely to overlook it.

Just look for the little clock- or bellshaped icon in any notification’s lower-right corner – and if you aren’t seeing any such symbol, tap the little down-facing arrow within the notification to expand it first.

Tap that icon, and you’ll see choices to snooze the notification and show it again in 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour or two hours.

In some Android versions, the notification will automatically snooze for an hour by default, and you’ll have to tap it once more to reveal the full list of available reminder options and select a different amount of time.

However you go about it, your notification will disappear out of your hair and then re-emerge later to make sure you don’t forget.