I love getting reminders. I need reminders. Productivity guru David Allen famously said, “your brain is for having ideas, not holding them.” I agree 100%. Luckily, I learned a few decades ago that my life ran better when I got things out of my head and onto paper. Back twenty years ago that meant that I still had to open up my planner to see the reminder I had made for myself. Thankfully, life is easier now.

For instance, many people are familiar with and use products such as Apple’s Reminders app to help them offload important details and keep their schedules from falling apart. For whatever reason, that particular option never worked for me, even though I am all in on the Apple ecosystem. It goes to show that we are unique and that what works for several million others, might not work for us.

Appointments and due dates aren’t the only things I want to be reminded of, though. I also want to be reminded of my values, my long term goals, and, as an educator, my philosophy of teaching and learning and what best practices are. Indeed, this is why religious people attend services regularly (or, are supposed to anyway); the spaced repetition helps us remember more deeply what is important. It works for teenagers in high school and it works for adults, too.

One thing I always thought would work for me would be to have a card deck with important reminders on them. I imagine I could keep them at my desk, or in my car, or in my bag, and every day I could shuffle up the deck and be reminded of a bespoke idea that would be great to review again. Being a nerd, I came up with a list of 60 reminders to help me be true to myself. I also came up with 60 reminders about teaching that I wanted to remind myself about on a regular basis. However, instead of manufacturing two physical card decks, I have discovered I can use the new Daily Pulse email option for ChatGPT Plus subscribers to have Chat go into my two lists in Notion and randomly remind me of two ideas via a morning email. Pretty cool. Now, every morning at 6 I get an email from ChatGPT that is tailored specifically to me and what I want to be reminded about before I start my day. I realize some people are wary of AI, but this sort of use case is exciting to me.