A software called Reminders:

An alarm clock and a calendar are very useful tools to remind us of a task and to execute it at the scheduled time. Its great for planning and its very personal. But the latter is what we want to change when we work on a list of resources loaned out to many people. If we had a software that could send out emails based on templates for the various resources that are currently used by others, the chore of maintenance, reuse  and reclamation becomes all the more easy. But this is just one of the usages.

A software utility like Cron is also a time-based job scheduler however in an non-interactive Unix like computer operating systems. People who setup and maintain  software environments use cron to schedule  jobs, commands or shell scripts to run periodically  at fixed times, dates,  or intervals. It’s hard for the Cron job users to use it visually in a web browser that can be accessed from a variety of devices. How then can they use it when they are not near a machine ?

Somewhere between these two extremes of a highy interactive albeit personal productivity tool to more business oriented non-interactive background job scheduler,  there is a niche space for a  software I like to call Reminders that can print labels that can be slapped on to any thing we want to remind ourselves about.

First this software can send reminders as affable to us as emails so that we have a variety of information and the context to complete the task. It involves hyperlinks and many other features. It works along the principles of a birthday alarm but provides a placeholder for a variety of reminders.

Secondly this software can send reminders not just to ourselves but to millions others. Hence its not just a little note for ourselves but one that can be our butler for informing many others. This provides the kind of white glove treatment that may set the tone for not just an event as some calendars do but for adding the kind of information that anyone and not just us can work with at their pace.

Thirdly this software can schedule any kind of job that can be exercised without intervention. Just like the commercial Cron can schedule jobs in the background, this can serve a variety of tasks.

Fourth, it prints labels that can be attached to just about anything that we want to remind us something about. Given the label, we can look up an inventory of reminders to see what the purpose and tasks are. The labels are almost nothing more than barcodes and therefore have the ability to be included in a variety of rich information.

Such is the description of the software that can be both personal, professional and efficient with fun tags or labels to attach to resources, tasks or even calendars or visiting cards to improve the productivity, reuse and value discoveries in cycles.