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Comment by qrio2 | Hacker News Reader

I will give this a shot. So far it seems like a planning app that includes tasks that i think of. I need something that alerts me of calendar events or upcoming things so that I don't forget about them. The app tells me it can set reminders and notify me but I don't think that is true from what i can see here.

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Can't your regular calendar already remind you of scheduled events? That particular function doesn't seem like it needs an AI.

From my experience with ADHD - calenders are excruciatingly hard to use consistently. Either it "takes too much time" or I completely forget I was trying to use a calender.

Having a tool that can automatically add items from infodumps/todolists would be useful.

I don't udnerstand the chrome extension part though.

Keep an notepad file open; only when you remeber add stuff to it. At some point it will become a hardened habit and honestly much better than some AI crutch. There are better uses for AI in my opinion..

I have many files and many pages of an actual notebook. For the most part dates are near useless because I rarely refer back to todo-lists. I've tried todo lists but they just end up being a pile of todo items I never look at, get around to, remember what they're for, or don't have time/priority to do it.

Obsidian helps a lot for actual notes. That's the only thing keeping me remotely organized.

> At some point it will become a hardened habit and honestly much better than some AI crutch. There are better uses for AI in my opinion..

That's very true, what I would love to see is have it intelligently pull todo items from my obsidian notes. I'm personally not a fan of using AI for anything if it's not local though, especially with access to all of my notes.

> At some point it will become a hardened habit and honestly much better than some AI crutch.

One of the symptoms of ADHD is borderline impossibility of forming habits, in the way that neurotypical people think about them.

Not true at all, and obviously im on this thread because im not neurotypical. ADHD is about misfunctioning emotional regulation and nothing to do with inability to form habits, as a matter of fact coping strategies is basically habits that work with disfunction. With ADHD I can focus extremely well, hyperfocus actually but not on the things that I find boring.

I'm strongly in the "near impossible to form habits" ADHD camp, so I agree with GP and disagree with you. Or, I guess, there are different flavors to the experience. Mine includes my mind actively resisting habit forming.

ADHD is also about executive dysfunction, which means I often forget or find it "too hard" (due to insufficient dopamine) to do the behavior I want to make into a habit. But it's different to everyone, I have inattentive ADHD, you might have a hyperactive ADHD which means you struggle with emotional regulation and impulsivity far more than executive dysfunction and inattentiveness, so different tools work for you.

> Keep an notepad file open; only when you remeber add stuff to it.

"Keep using X, remember to interact with it" is exactly the problems people struggle with in the first place. This is not an actionable advice on its own.

Google calendar is actually terrible for people with focus problems. Or at least I haven't found a good way to manage its alerts in a helpful way.

For one, basically all alerts are the same. Meaning there's no good way to make noisy alerts for critical events and quiet ones for mundane things. You can set multiple alerts for an event, like 1 week before, 1 day before, etc. But it's manual every time.

Something more like PagerDuty style alerts that let you set up classes of alert patterns would help. Alerts that blow up your phone until you get them would help. It's so easy to have the calendar alerts go completely unnoticed with just a chime if your phone is in your pocket or in another room or if your alert volumes don't happen to be perfect, which is pretty much impossible since background noise levels change throughout the day.

Even such minor things, like when you snooze an alert and you can configure it to notify X minutes before the event, if you select 0 minutes it still alerts the minute before the event which is enough time for me to get distracted again.

No, it's one of my biggest disappointments of technology today is that such basic tools are so poor at their job and lack such straightforward configuration controls. The tools are made to work for Google, not for you.

So of course people are going to points loads of third party add ons, and hacks to get calendar to be marginally more useful, but WHY should we need to jump through hoops to make our devices serve some actual useful purpose for us?

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