Improving the notification / reminder experience

[ShuoShen]

Notification can be a very useful feature for a productivity app, as it surfaces the data for quick glance, without having users to dig deep into the app. As I'm using orgzly the notification, i feel it's general lacking, and I feel quite passionate about improving it. From my own experience and looking at the issues, I can see a few pain points.

Problems

1. Information overloading. [How to Disable Daily Reminders, But Keep SCHEDULED Time Reminders? #320] For example, every morning, a user can get a large list of reminders that include the entire days. The monolithic content of the reminders and lack of summarization make it difficult to read.
2. Staleness of reminders. [Delete / update outdated reminders (notifications) #573] The reminders don't get updated as we close/update tasks or sync the notebooks, so by the end of the day, there are a bunch of outdated reminders.
3. Lack of customization per note. Some users want to find different notification timing depending on the type of note. It's not customizable.

Proposal

Based on this, I'm proposing a few focus areas that we could do to make notifications more helpful, along with some examples of the desired user experiences.

1. State consistency & freshness [Delete / update outdated reminders (notifications) #573, Trigger the notification manually  #117]

   • Auto-cleanup: Remove notifications when you complete or reschedule tasks
   • Stay fresh: Update notifications when you sync with your desktop
   • Quick fixes: Add a "Refresh" button to update all notifications at once
   • Oops protection: Easily restore notifications you accidentally dismissed

2. Make notifications more readable and useful [How to Disable Daily Reminders, But Keep SCHEDULED Time Reminders? #320, Add "Complete" button to notification reminders #533]

   • Smart summaries: Group related tasks together (like "3 done, 5 to go")
   • Priority first: Highlight time-sensitive reminders separately from daily summary
   • Clear signals: Use icons to show what's what:
     📅 Daily overview
     ⏰ Time-specific tasks
     🔄 Recurring items
     ⚠️ Overdue tasks
   • Quick actions: Mark done, snooze, or start timing your task right from the notification

3. Supporting common features in desktop org-mode [Notify x minutes before scheduled time #171]

   • Work with org-mode: support the common properties you already use in your org files,
     like reporting that a clocked-in task has taken more time than the effort.
   • Custom alerts: Set different reminder times based on the specification in tasks

Next Steps

I'd like to hear feedback from the community. Would also be happy to create a document to track the pain points and proposals. Then we can prioritize the desired features, and discuss how to build them. I do think the existing tech stack need a revamp to support some of the new features, and we can have a separate discussion about that.

On the other hand, there might be alternatives to implementing a sophisticated notification system, such as syncing with calendar and leveraging calendar's notification. Would like to brainstorm these ideas.

Please let me know what you think.

[ngm]

Hi @ShuoShen

Thank you for starting this discussion. I agree with you - I realize that I have stopped using orgzly notifications altogether because of the problems of information overload and stale reminders that you mention.

I do not have more specific feedback at the moment but I support your ideas and am hopeful you are able to implement them! Useful notifications would be a great addition to orgzly.

[ShuoShen]

Thanks @ngm for the feedback and support.

Do you have any specific notification pain points or desires use cases? Knowing about more details would help us prioritize.

[jpggithub]

@ShuoShen When I have a notification from orgzly, I would like to have the option to configure a snooze when I can’t do the task.

1. It would be nice to have multiple choices for snooze (for instance, 5 min, 10 min, 1 day and so on). This choices would be configurable in the parameters of the app.

2. More, it would also be nice to choose manually the duration of the snooze it the choices already configured does not fit.

Anyway, it would be nice if you improve the reminders of orgzly! 👍