A reminder should trigger an action you can finish before you'd finish reading a text about why you can't do it right now. If the action takes longer than about two minutes, a reminder is the wrong tool — you need a task manager, a calendar block, or a project plan instead. Reminders are for cues. Anything bigger needs planning, and planning doesn't fit in a notification.
Why this distinction actually matters
Most people's reminder apps fail for the same reason: they're full of things that were never two-minute tasks to begin with. "Redesign the onboarding flow" sits there as a reminder, fires at 9am, gets swiped away, and reappears tomorrow — because a notification can't hold the fifteen sub-decisions that task actually requires. Eventually you stop reading the notifications at all, which is a well-documented failure mode: once a cue reliably produces dismissal instead of action, your brain learns to ignore the cue itself, not just that one instance of it.
This is also why habit-tracking apps get abandoned within a few weeks. They ask you to log something meaningful ("reflect on today's progress") rather than something trivial ("drink one glass of water"), and the friction between "see the prompt" and "action complete" is too wide to survive a busy day. BJ Fogg's core argument in Tiny Habits is that behaviour change sticks when the action is almost embarrassingly small — small enough that motivation is irrelevant. A reminder system should be built on the same principle: the notification and the finished action should be seconds apart.
How to sort a reminder from a project
Before you type something into a reminder app, ask three questions:
- Can I finish this in under two minutes, right now, without more information? If you'd need to open five tabs or make a decision first, it's not ready to be a reminder.
- Is this one action, or a sequence of actions? "Reply to Dana's email" is one action. "Plan Dana's onboarding" is a sequence hiding inside a noun phrase.
- Does missing the cue cost me the whole task, or just delay it? If it's genuinely time-bound (a call, a meeting, a medication dose), it's a reminder. If it's flexible and needs deep focus, it belongs on a calendar as a block, not a ping.
Worked example, side by side:
- Reminder: "Reply to Dana's email" — one action, finishable in under two minutes, no dependencies. Fire it once, at a specific time, and you're done.
- Not a reminder: "Redesign the onboarding flow" — this is a project. It needs research, drafts, review, and probably other people. Putting it in a reminder app just guarantees a notification you'll dismiss for a month.
The fix for the second one isn't a bigger reminder — it's breaking it down. "Redesign the onboarding flow" becomes a project in whatever tool holds projects for you (Notion, Asana, a notebook), and the reminder becomes the two-minute-sized entry point: "Block 90 minutes Thursday to sketch onboarding wireframes" or "Send Dana the onboarding brief to review." The reminder's job is to get you to start, or to do the small thing — not to hold the whole scope.
This is where a plain-English reminder tool earns its keep, precisely because it's built for the small stuff. Nudgle runs inside Telegram — you message it "remind me to reply to Dana at 4pm" or "remind me to take the bins out every Tuesday night" and it parses the schedule without a form or a date picker. It also does random-window reminders — "call the dentist, sometime between 10am and midday, weekdays" — which suits micro-tasks that don't need a fixed slot but do need to happen this week. None of this is designed to hold a project. That's the point: it stays useful because it never tries to be more than a cue.
Where this breaks down
The two-minute rule isn't universal. Some genuinely large tasks still deserve a reminder as a trigger — not to complete the task, but to start it. "Open the onboarding doc and write one paragraph" is a legitimate reminder even though the underlying project is huge, because the reminder's scope is deliberately shrunk to match Fogg's tiny-habits logic, and James Clear's version of the same idea in Atomic Habits: make the first step so small it's easier to do than to skip.
Also worth being honest about: this only works if you're already living in Telegram, or willing to be. If your task list is in Things or Todoist and you never open Telegram otherwise, adding another app — even a low-friction one — is one more place to check, which defeats the purpose. And fixed-time reminders that repeat identically every day are exactly the kind of cue that triggers alarm fatigue after a few weeks; if a recurring reminder stops registering, that's a sign it needs a random window, not a louder alert.
One thing to do today
Open your task list and find one item that's actually a project pretending to be a task — something you've dismissed more than twice. Break off the smallest possible first action (one email, one sentence, one phone call) and set that as a reminder instead of the whole thing. Try Nudgle free in Telegram if you want to see how it handles the parsing.