Imperfect memory? Siri will remind you
Long ago in the dark ages before the iPhone, I used to tell my family that if they didn’t see me physically write an event down in my day planner or to-do list, the event didn’t exist. If they couldn’t confirm that it was written down in one of those two places, there was little to no chance of me showing up.
I realized recently I haven’t said that in many years, and Siri is the reason. You see, while I’m getting older and my memory is slowly failing me, Siri never forgets a thing. And since I’m never far from an iPhone, iPad or Mac, I use Siri as my backup memory.
Here’s how it works: When I need to be reminded of something — anything — I merely summon Siri on my nearest Apple device and say, “Remind me to call my mother.” Siri always complies and adds an item to the Reminders app that says, “Call your mother.”
That’s good, but it requires me to open the Reminders app to be effective. So, I rarely just ask Siri to remind me of something. Rather, I ask her to remind me of things at a specific time or date: “Remind me to call my mother at 4 p.m. today” or “Remind me to call my mother tomorrow morning.”
My reminder is not only stored safely in Reminders, but I’ll be alerted on the appropriate time or day on all my Apple devices.
That’s better, but not appropriate for everything I might wish to be reminded of. For example, if I need milk or eggs, I’d rather be reminded when I’m near the grocery store. This one requires a bit of preplanning, but it’s worth it.
The preplanning consists of adding the addresses of merchants whose locations might be useful as triggers for reminders to your Contacts. I added the H-E-B closest to my house, so now I can ask Siri to “remind me to get some milk when I’m near H-E-B,” and when I drive by H-E-B, I’ll get an alert on my iPhone that says, “Pick up some milk.”
If the alert doesn’t give you enough warning, open Reminders (iPhone or Mac), click on the location for the reminder, and then click the blue dot on a circle and drag to enlarge the location’s radius. The default is around 200 meters; to get sufficient warning at 35 mph, I drag it to a radius of 1,000 or 1,500 meters.
One last thing: I have not burned a frozen pizza or anything else in years because I almost always ask Siri to “set a timer for 18 minutes,” before I put it in the oven. Unlike all the previous reminders, a timer doesn’t create a reminder in the Reminders app; it merely alerts you at the appropriate time and then disappears.