The Futility Of Remind and Later

Most issue tracking/customer relation/todo list things have a concept of resolving an issue for later or a remind me later option. The idea is that you don’t want to or can’t deal with the issue straight away, but you need to come back and review it or follow up later.

Unfortunately, it turns out that marking an issue for later tends to mean “make this disappear so I have no chance of remembering it” because the issue disappears from all the open issues lists forever. Many systems have an option to e-mail you regularly about issues that are marked as remind or later, but the e-mails are hit and miss – usually they remind you about the issue too early and you just get used to ignoring them.

What I don’t understand is why these systems don’t just ask the user for a date to follow up on. If you mark the issue as later, you should have to specify a date upon which the issue will automatically be marked as open again. If you specify remind, you should have to specify when to start and how often to send reminders. The reminders could either come via e-mail or some other system or just by raising the status of the bug so it appears on open issues lists again or both.

We’ve seen various problems with this over the years in various different systems where things got forgotten, but the worst example occurred this afternoon. I was closing out some bugs and went to mark one as a duplicate of bug 2171, but mistyped and marked it as a duplicate of bug 271 instead. Our of curiosity I went back and checked what bug 2171 was. Turns out, it was still assigned to me and marked as “REMIND”. Since 2002. On the plus side, the fix shipped many years back, we just didn’t realize the bug was still open. The last few comments are now:

——- Comment #2 From Adrian Sutton 2002-06-28 16:15:03  ——-

Using the nifty new weekly reminder feature to make sure we don’t forget it. :)

——- Comment #3 From Adrian Sutton 2003-03-27 17:10:22 ——-

Using the nifty new weekly reminder feature to make sure we don’t forget
it. :)

Oh the irony…. What happened to that nifty new weekly reminder feature???

And more relevantly, what’s the deal with this bug, can it be closed now or are
still waiting?

——- Comment #5 From Adrian Sutton 2007-03-21 15:32:36 ——-

I think we can safely close this bug now. RIP bug, RIP.