A reminder is a note from you, to you.
After you make a plan with a friend, your archive can remind you through a phone notification, calendar entry, email, or text. You choose the channel. This page explains what each channel may reveal while carrying the reminder. The technical page describes the controls.
The idea, in one picture
One house, one person, one note that loops back at the right time, with nobody else taking part. Your friend's archive does her own reminding, her own way, and neither of you sees the other's.
The plan-making page told the story of two archives agreeing on a walk without opening their calendars to each other. This page is about what happens after the agreement: each archive quietly turns to its own person and says, Saturday, 10 o'clock, don't forget. That turn inward is the whole system.
Where reminders come from
From plans with friends
The moment a plan is confirmed (the walk, the call, the swim), your archive sets up the reminding on its own. The evening before, and an hour ahead, unless you'd rather be nudged differently. Cancel the plan and its reminders leave with it, quietly. Nothing nags you about a walk that isn't happening.
From your own life
Medicine at 8, every day. The car inspection on August 1. Calling your mother on Sundays. Charging the watch. Any note you'd leave yourself, with a time attached. One line, and the archive keeps it faithfully.
Nobody watches you being reminded
Reminding is private. Your friend never learns whether your archive had to nag you once or five times. No company gets a little chart of your snoozes. Nothing about the reminding (how many, how often, whether you needed them) ever leaves your archive.
You choose the messenger
A note to yourself still has to travel from your archive to your eyes, and there's more than one road. You pick, per reminder or once for everything. What matters is that some roads are carried by other people's computers, and those computers can read what they carry. There's no scandal in it. That's how those roads work. We just refuse to pretend otherwise:
| Messenger | Who can read the note on the way |
|---|---|
| A notification on your device | No one. It never leaves your own hardware. This is the everyday choice. |
| Apple Calendar | Your device, if the calendar lives only on it. If it's an iCloud calendar, Apple's computers keep a copy; the setup screen discloses that behavior. |
| Google Calendar | Google's computers carry it and can read it. Always. That's what a hosted calendar is. |
| Your mail company can read what it delivers. | |
| Text message | The phone company reads texts in plain form. That's how texting works. |
The postcard rule
Because some roads are readable, what travels on them is written like a postcard, the kind the mail carrier can see. Short on purpose. The full note shows only on your own device:
Walk with Marta — Sat
10:00 your time · her 7 in the evening
Sat 10:00 — you have a plan
Want the full words to travel anyway, the medicine's name in the text message, say, because that's what actually helps? You can choose that, road by road. The screen tells you in one plain sentence who will be able to read it, and then it's your call. Your archive never chooses the road for you. It never packs anything into a reminder you didn't write into it.
It won't wake you at 3 in the morning
Reminders keep quiet hours: from 10 at night to 7 in the morning, a reminder waits. When delivered, it includes the delay. There's one exception: a reminder you marked as urgent at night (medicine that keeps to its own clock) is allowed through because you chose that setting.
It tells you when it's late
If plans change, reminders follow. Cancel the walk and every waiting reminder for it stands down. Your history stays, so you can look back and see that the walk was planned and then cancelled.
If a reminder is late, it says so. Computer was asleep at 9:00? When it wakes, the reminder arrives saying "this was for 9:00." It never pretends to be on time.
If it's too late to matter, it stays quiet. A reminder for a walk that already started doesn't fire an hour after. It retires, and the record shows why.
No streaks, no scores, no confetti. The archive keeps your word. It doesn't grade you on it.
Which messengers work when your laptop is closed
The calendar roads are the sturdy ones today. A reminder placed on your calendar rides in your phone's own calendar app, which does its own alerting, laptop open or closed, phone in your pocket.
Notifications, email, and text need your own computer awake for now. A small helper on your own machine sends them. We run no servers of our own for this yet. A tiny always-on helper, on hardware we trust, is on the plan, and this page will say so, dated, when it exists.
So the advice is: for a must-not-miss, put it on a calendar too. The setup screen gives the same advice.
Where this stands
Built July 18, 2026, the same day it was designed, as a working prototype, on invented data. All ten of the blueprint's pass/fail checks pass, watched by 59 automated checks of this piece's own (678 across the whole system), including an independent attempt to break it that found five real problems, each fixed before this page said the word "built." Two made-up archives ran the whole story end to end: a plan confirmed nine time zones apart, the reminders derived on each side, a 3 AM reminder politely holding until morning, a cancelled walk going quiet.
There is no app to download yet. The messengers that leave your machine (the notification, the email, the text) were tested through stand-ins. No real send has happened. Their first real send happens on real hardware, by a person, and this page will say so, dated, when that happens.
A few choices are still the founder's to make (what the folder is called, the exact quiet hours, how terse the postcards are), recorded in the blueprint as open decisions.
Your archive stays yours. Reminders read your plans at home. They speak to you alone. They tell no one how the remembering went.
How to help, and how to tell us something's wrong
See a problem, or something that worries you? On the main site: Write to us → "feedback," or Write to us → "security" for good-faith lock-testing, welcomed, credited, and protected by a safe harbor written into our Terms, §15.
Want to build it with us? Apply → "build," and read the technical page — it shows exactly what is designed, what is inherited from tested code, and what has yet to be built.
Just following along? The "New in this place" board on the main site announces every change, dated.