For some of you who know my wife, Elma, knows that she is very forgetful. Which normally isn’t an issue as I keep on top of things. Elma lately wanted to take more in charge and be on top of things, but due to her short term memory she would ask me to remind her of her things such as picking up medications, or calling the mechanic for an appointment.

Now my method was to usually create a todo in my google tasks such that they remind me to remind her. Clearly second hand reminders.. lol. This worked well for a good week or two until her list started growing and I became more and more lazy, I needed a way to automate this. Welcome to the Reverse Honey-do list.

Using IFTTT, I created the following flow:

  1. Every morning at 9AM, loop through all my to-do’s in my google tasks
  2. Any to-do that have the string Elma in it, add it to one big message
  3. Send to message to Elma via SMS

With the filter criteria being

var tasks = GoogleTasks.listAllTasks;
var i;
var message = '';

var foundTask = false;
for (i=0; i < tasks.length;i++) {
  if (tasks[i].Title.search('Elma') > -1) {
    message = message + tasks[i].Title + "\r\n"
    foundTask = true
  }
}

if (foundTask == true) {
  AndroidMessages.sendAMessage.setText(message)
} else {
  AndroidMessages.sendAMessage.skip()
}

Now all I need to do is to add to-do’s in my system that have her name to it, and poof like magic every morning she gets a reminder from her beloved husband Automated Hasnain