Customizing Reminder Defaults for Google Keep

Life is wonderful; its full of events, people, and art. You wake up every day thinking about what you are going to do with your day. Sometimes, it can be overwhelming. Whether its work projects, meetings, college assignments, dinners, or family events, many things come up which can be difficult to juggle.

That is what technology is for. Let me introduce you to Google Keep. With this lovely app, you won’t ever forget any upcoming events with the help of its ‘Reminder’ feature. We’ll show you how to master this powerful tool.

Google Keep

Google Keep is a productivity app specialized in organizing tasks, notes, and drafts. It’s developed by the supermassive mega-corp tech giant, Google. Google Keep was launched on 20 March 2013. It’s available in the form of mobile apps on Android and iOS. It’s also available in the form of a web application.

Key Features

The main UI of the Google Keep web app is sleek and minimalistic. Primary functions are on the leftmost tab (vertical), adding new notes in the middle top, and notes you created will appear in the middle of the screen, while settings and view options are available in the top right corner. Overall, the UI is crystal clear, and intuitive.

We’ll walk you through a few of its features, starting from the most important one.

Reminders

The reminder is a tool to let Google Keep remind you about the notes you have written based on the time and date parameters you chose. You can add reminders by making a new note in the ‘Reminders’ tab, or press that little bell button on the bottom left of the note tab.

Let’s say you created a simple note saying, “don’t forget to buy the milk,” and you set it up at 4 pm. The note will be created in the ‘Reminders’ section, marked ‘Upcoming”. Once its 4 pm, the reminder triggers, and your phone will ring. The note will be marked as “Fired” and moved into the “Notes” section, so when you open the app, it will be there to tell you, and it’s up to you to review it.

Customizing Default Reminders

Google Keep offers a pretty extensive amount of options you can fine-tune. You can choose the date on a mini calendar, you can select the time from some default presets or choose the “Customize” time option.

The repeating function lets you choose how and when the reminder will repeat. If you click on “customize,” you’ll be presented with options like these:

• How many times will the note be repeated, and on which days? Every 2 weeks on Monday and Friday? Go for it!
• When will the reminder end? After how many occurrences? or maybe you want to end it on a specific date?

If you’re a morning person, you might be annoyed to see the default “Morning” schedule set to 8 am, while you wake up at 4 am every day. To customize the time default preset, you need to go to “Settings” and look under the “Reminder defaults” tab. There are 3 reminder defaults, which are morning, afternoon, and evening. You can change the time of each default to suit your needs.

Labels

Labels are used to classify and categorize your notes. You can add a label on a note by clicking the three-dot icon, then go to ‘add a label,’ or make a hashtag with the name of your desired label at the end of your notes.

You can also sort the labels by placing numbers in front of the actual label. For example, as shown above, if you want “Work” to be at the top, you can change it to “1 – Work.”

Archive and Trash

When you have a lot of notes, sometimes it’s hard to track which one is more important or recent than the others. The archive lets you ‘hide’ the notes from the main “Notes” tab, so you can focus on what is important or keep a clean UI that’s more welcoming. One useful tip to archiving your notes fast is to hover at the desired note, then simply press E.

The Trash bin is the place where all your deleted notes go. It’s useful when you accidentally deleted an important note, or simply just looking through the journey of your weekly notes.

General Tips

Here are a few tips to improve your organizing skills on Google Keep

1. Make It Colorful

Put colors on your notes, especially the labels. Assign different colors for different labels to make it pop out and easy to remember.

2. Archive Often

A Decluttered workspace gives peace of mind. Try to archive most of your notes and focus on a few essential notes. Use the E key to archive notes fast.

3. Seamlessness

Take advantage of Google Keep’s seamlessness by taking notes on any gadget you hold. Android, Apple phones, Chromebooks, laptops. Google Keep will automatically sync all of your notes and enables you to edit and view notes across different platforms.

4. Compatibility

Google, being a well-established tech company, offers various compatibility across other apps such as Google Assistant and Google Docs. You can copy your entire note to Google Docs for further elaboration. You can also tell Google Assistant, “Add milk to my grocery shopping list.” so you don’t have to tip-tap your way into the app.