Default settings for new reminders

What you can set

Settings → New reminder defaults:

• How far out a new reminder lands — an offset, or a fixed hour of the day
• Priority
• Early warning
• A tag and a folder
• Your quick times — the one-tap chips under the When field

These matter most for the ways of saving that open nothing at all. Pressing Alt+Shift+Y uses your default and shows a toast; if the default is wrong for how you actually work, every fast save lands somewhere you did not want it.

An offset or an hour

These are two ways of answering the same question and they are genuinely different.

• An offset — "in one hour", "in three hours". Relative to whenever you pressed the key.
• A fixed hour — "the next 9am". Save something at 4:37pm and it lands tomorrow morning rather than at 4:37pm tomorrow.

The second is what most people mean by "tomorrow", and it is worth setting deliberately. An offset of twenty-four hours is this time tomorrow, which is rarely what anybody wants at 4:37 in the afternoon.

The precedence chain

Four things can have an opinion about a new reminder. They resolve in one order, strongest first, and it is the same order everywhere in the product:

1. The reminder itself — anything you typed wins outright
2. A template you applied
3. A per-site rule matching the page
4. Your global defaults — this page
5. Latr's built-in defaults

Each layer only speaks about the fields it actually sets. A site rule that says nothing about priority does not blank your default priority; the question falls through to the next layer down.

Fields that resolve together

The offset and the fixed hour are one question asked two ways, so they are resolved as one field rather than separately. Whichever layer wins supplies both.

Without that, the chain inverts itself: a global default of "the next 9am" would keep supplying its hour underneath a site rule that had already won on the offset, and the weaker layer would end up deciding the time while the settings page drew a chain it was not obeying.

Getting yours right

The test is what you do with a reminder after it fires. If you routinely snooze the keyboard-shortcut saves to the next morning, your default should be the next morning and you have been paying a snooze for it every time.

Two defaults worth considering rather than leaving:

• A default tag. Even one — inbox — makes everything you saved without thinking findable in a single click later.
• The quick times. The built-in four are In 1 hour, Tonight, Tomorrow and Next week. Adding even one of your own replaces all four, which is the point: the first custom entry is you saying what your week actually looks like.