“Always turn a negative situation into a positive situation.”
- Michael Jordan
We are sometimes asked why we offer the option to vary the delivery time of a reminder for a reminder. Everyone else uses a very precise time for an alarm to go off - isn’t that the only way one does that? No, it isn’t.
At RxMinder, we have two options for a reminder time. The first is the conventional way - pick a time you want, and we’ll send the reminder at that time. Our second option is to specify a 30 minute window of time, where we’ll send the reminder sometime within that block. The exact time moves for each new delivery, so one afternoon it might be 2:27pm and the next day 2:02pm.
At first glance it seems odd. Alarms are always precise - at a very specific time. Why aren’t we doing that?
Our rationale for offering varying the time gets to one of our theories on reminders/alarms. If you read our post about how we started, you would have learned about an experiment with an Alexa using specific times. We believe that when alarms remind us of something we really don’t want to do, we come to resent them. In other words, if at 8am every morning I have an alarm set to take a medication that sometimes has a side-effect of making my stomach upset - I won’t be looking forward to that reminder. In fact, I may come to resent that time of the morning for what it represents.
It’s like waking up early before your alarm to get up for work goes off. That alarm is bringing you bad news - in this case, you need to get out of a warm bed to get ready for work.
So we offer the option to vary the time and not let 8am be associated with something negative. Sometimes it will be 8:22, sometimes 8:07. We mix it up.
Now not everyone wants this option, which we completely understand. That’s why if you want to take that pill that needs to be with a meal at precisely 12:15pm - you can set the reminder to be that way, and that’s when we’ll reach out. This feature came from a user that was timing the medication to coincide with meals, and the variation caused more frustration than it saved.
It’s a big world out there and we like to give options to our customers. Which method do you like better and why? What other ideas do you have that’s different from these? We’d love to hear from you.
Have feedback or questions? Please reach out to us at feedback@rxminder.co.