Like everyone else, it’s a new year and so I have some resolutions and goals I’ve set for my health and happiness. But in a month I’ll have gotten sidetracked. So is there a way to have Cortana help with reminders on my PC?
There are a lot of reminder apps and programs for the Windows environment but you are spot on that the best choice of all is Cortana. And Cortana’s built in to the Windows 10 search system, whether you talk to her or just prefer to type and get pop-up responses. I understand, not everyone wants to chat with their laptop or smartphone! 🙂
The most common new year’s resolutions are related to diet and eating, exercise, losing weight, saving more money, learning a new skill and quitting smoking. Oh, and reading more and finding another job are both in the top ten for people too. Most all of those lend themselves to gentle reminders at key points during the day or month, so having your PC pop up a reminder to “eat healthy” 15 minutes before your lunch break each weekday, or to “hit the gym!” just as your workday is wrapping up can indeed make a difference and help you keep your resolutions front of mind as the year progresses.
And for all of these, Cortana is your new best friend. Let’s have a look!
First off, remember that Cortana is a natural language processing system, so you don’t need to learn a special command invocation, just type in a request for a reminder:
In this case I have typed in “remind me every day at 4pm head to gym“. Does it work?
Well, apparently Cortana’s gotten disconnected from my Microsoft Live account:
“Oh drat” indeed! Fortunately you can just click on the “Sign in” button and it’ll sync everything up:
Unfortunately, it has lost my reminder query so I’ll need to type it in again, but this time Cortana understands my request and converts it into a reminder template:
Perfect. You can see that it’s figured out exactly what I want to set up and has it all ready to go. I could even add a photo of my gym or even of someone I admire who is in excellent physical shape as an inspiration by clicking “Add a photo”. Or just click “Remind”.
Done.
Now, let’s try a slightly more complex reminder:
Looks good, right? Well, when you click on “Set a reminder” or just press Enter you’ll find that this time Cortana didn’t quite understand the request:
It didn’t get what I wanted to be reminded of, nor did it understand Mon-Fri as a range and instead assumed those were the only two days I wanted to be reminded. Ooops. On the other hand, turns out you can type directly into these boxes and the frequency is something you can click and adjust too:
That’s what I want, Every Weekday. Fix that up as needed, click “Remind” and you’re ready to burst into the new year with your resolutions now far more likely to happen.
Want to double check it’s all set up properly? Just type or say “my reminders” to Cortana:
And there ya go. Good luck with it all this year!
(eagle eyed readers will note that the get to sleep early reminder still has the wrong frequency. A click lets you fix it, which is exactly what I did once I saw in ‘my reminders’ that it was set incorrectly)
Pro Tip: We have oodles of Windows 10 help pages here on the site. Please take advantage and peruse ’em to find more help!
easy I don’t let the bitch on my machine, is one of my problems with win 10, is BS they load what they want, we should be giving the option of not loading if we do not want the trash they have in the package, bottom line most of what is in the package
is not needed at all, is just my problem takes a while to delete it