A Chrome reminder extension that writes the message for you

Every reminder app tells you to go and do a thing. By the time it fires you've lost the context that made the task easy, so you put it off again. This one does the thing first and hands it back finished.

Guide · Updated August 2026 · 5 min read

The problem with normal reminders

At 11am you're looking at an invoice thread and you think: I should chase this on Thursday. So you set a reminder. Thursday at 4pm your phone buzzes: "Follow up with Priya."

And now you have to find the thread again, remember which invoice, remember what was already said, and write the message from cold. Which takes ten minutes you don't have at 4pm on a Thursday, so you snooze it. That's not a discipline problem. The reminder handed you a task when it could have handed you the finished work.

Write it while you still have the context. Get it back when you need it.

How this one works

You're on the page. You open the sidebar, ask it to draft the follow-up — it can already see the thread, so it doesn't need to be told what this is about — and attach that draft to a reminder for Thursday at 4.

Thursday at 4, a card appears on whatever page you're looking at. It doesn't say "write to Priya". It shows the message, with a Copy draft button.

From one minute to any date

Presets are 1 min · 5 min · 15 min · 1 hour · tomorrow, plus a date picker for anything else. One minute is there because the commonest real use is "remind me the second I'm off this call", and making that the awkward case was a mistake.

The picker's floor is the next whole minute, so it can't offer you a time that has already gone.

Where the alert actually shows up

This took three attempts to get right, and the reason is worth knowing if you've ever wondered why browser reminders feel unreliable.

The obvious approach is chrome.notifications. On Windows that hands off to the Action Center — and if Focus Assist is on, or Chrome's notifications are switched off at the OS level, the notification is dropped silently. The API still reports success. There is no way for an extension to detect it. So the feature looks completely dead while working perfectly.

So the reminder is drawn on the page you're looking at instead — a card injected into the current tab, which needs no OS permission and can't be suppressed by a system setting. Three channels, in order:

• An in-page card on the active tab. Works everywhere an extension is allowed to run.
• A small window for the pages no extension may touch — chrome://, the Web Store, the new tab page.
• A toolbar badge with a count that sits there until you look. The safety net.

Why long reminders ask you to sign in

Scheduling uses chrome.alarms, which survives the tab closing and the background worker sleeping — unlike setTimeout, which does not. But alarms live only in that browser profile. Reinstall the extension, update Chrome, or move to another machine and a local alarm is gone.

Anything short survives that in practice. A reminder for next Tuesday very likely won't. So reminders further than 24 hours out are mirrored to your account, and that needs a sign-in. It's a real technical reason, not a paywall — and the 24-hour case, which is most of them, needs nothing.

How it compares

Screen time, while you're here

The same panel tracks how long you actually spend on a site, and will nudge you once past a limit you set in hours and minutes. It only counts when a tab is genuinely in front of you and you're using it — idle tabs and background windows don't inflate the number, which is the flaw in most trackers.

It counts page-side rather than through the tabs permission, which is deliberate: tabs makes Chrome show a "read your browsing history" warning at install, and that's too high a price for a convenience feature. None of it leaves your device. There's more in the screen time guide.