As you get older you’ll probably notice that things just start slipping your mind, becoming more noticeable as you get into middle age. Whether it’s age, the pace of the times, or just the accumulation of so many memories, all that’s relevant is that you want to remember what’s important to you! To do this you need to keep things on your mind by reviewing them regularly. Yet how often do we do that? And how do we do that? Calendars and task lists tend to fill up quickly, show everything all at once, and require a lot of maintenance to use effectively. Reminders are great as long as you are in a position to act when you get them. This is why Membrit was created.
Adding Membrits
The first step is to have something that you want to remember to remember. One sentence is usually enough to jog your memory. And that’s the whole point; the “oh yeah!” moments as you’re reviewing the Membrits in your feed. Adding a picture can make it even better, though we find that we tend to add the text first, and then add a picture later. We considered including videos, but they tend to overwhelm other feed content, which goes against the purpose of Membrit. In short, simple is better.
Also, while Membrit can handle tasks, it does so in a very Membrit-like way. They’re just thoughts like any other, but with a due date (which can come… and go…). We tend to find that if it may to take more than a few days, Membrit can help. If you need it tomorrow at 3pm, set an alarm.
So, when something occurs to you that you don’t want to forget, open up Membrit and add it. And then back to your day. It’s like saying to your assistant, “make sure I remember this…” (btw, we’re working on adding support for Alexa, Siri, etc). Don’t worry about the Cadence yet, unless you know what you want (good for you!).
If all you put in are tasks, Membrit would be boring. Add some pictures of family, friends, new acquaintances (Membrit is a great way to remember names!). Then there are recurring household maintenance items. Membrit can also deliver daily content that you can choose to add on a more regular basis. The more you add the more you’ll start to think of things to add; and your feed will become an oasis of your memories.
Reviewing Your Membrits
So now it’s time to review your feed. Just open Membrit; it almost always comes up right into the feed. You’ll notice that Membrits each get their own page. We don’t use a list for your feed, because then you would just scan to see what’s most important (yeah, we do it too). To move through your feed you can swipe, tap or use buttons. While the feed is pretty clean, there’s a lot of functionality just a tap away.
Reviewing your feed usually only takes a couple minutes, even once you’ve built up a library of Membrits. When you first start working with Membrit, you may find that nothing has been scheduled. Well, why not add some?
Make sure you enable notifications, so we can let you know when it’s time to review your Membrits. You can specify how many times a day you would like to be notified, and the beginning / ending times. That said, whatever is scheduled for review when you open Membrit will be in your feed.
So, what’s this Cadence thing?
If you had to review everything each time you used Membrit, that would get old quickly. Even if we just pick up where you left off, it wouldn’t make sense because each thought is different. And how you’d like to review them is unique to each. Yet requiring that you to provide a custom schedule for each Membrit would be a non-starter.
Enter the Membrit Cadence, our patent-pending process that schedules each Membrit. We realized during the R&D phase that it only took 3 factors to drive a very customized schedule: frequency-slope, frequency, and duration/cycle. Frequency (or speed) determines how often it will be scheduled. It turns out that it works better when frequency changes over time. Frequency slope simply means that you either want less over time, more over time, or to have the number be consistent. By default, Membrits you add use a decreasing slope. As for duration/cycle, it means different things depending on the slope (e.g., the duration of increasing slope is up to a date, while for flat-slope it’s the repeating cycle time). While there are several other ways to customize the Cadence (weekdays, times, etc), these are the most important.
While this may sound complicated, in practice it’s actually quite simple. You can just specify the slope and accept the defaults, or you can play with the various options and see how the schedule would unfold on a mini-planner. And you can change it at any time. That’s why we start with decreasing by default. You’ll see it in your feed soon, and you can change the Cadence whenever it makes sense to do so. That’s why we keep saying “play with the Cadence“. Change it as often as you want. It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it, and as you do you’ll find that what appears in your feed feels very natural to you.
Your Library
Membrits are stored in albums in order to allow you to group them by topic, cadence, sharing, etc. Each album is like a feed that you curate, with all of the albums providing content for your Membrit feed. You start out with a “My Membrits” album, can add as many as you need, and even follow others’. While Membrits in an album are listed in order, when each one appears depends on its Cadence, though all else being equal they will be presented in order. Albums can also be setup as playbooks, where only one topic appears each day (3-days, weeks, etc). But you can learn about playbooks later.
Social Membrit
Humans are social. Even our memories are social. We understand this. That said, Membrit is not a social media app per se — it’s not about what others think of your thoughts, it’s about keeping important things on your mind; and often those important things come from others. In Membrit, social means you can follow albums shared by others (and change the cadence to suit you), and share an album of your thoughts with connections and/or groups. But there are no comments or discussions (we had them early on, but took them out because we realized they actually got in the way). And we’ll soon be adding the ability to send an individual Membrit to connections. As of now, the social part of Membrit is fairly simplistic. We’re working on filling it out to provide the social experience that makes sense to our members.
Membership
There are 3 types of users: anonymous, registered, and members. Anyone can use Membrit on a single device without registering. Using Membrit on multiple devices requires that you register. To access social features, including publicly available albums, you’ll need to subscribe (free for the duration of beta). For now we don’t run ads, but we will likely do so in the future in non-member feeds.
Three Weeks
It takes about 3 weeks to make Membrit a part of your routine. We know that’s a lot to ask in today’s fast moving world. At the same time, the fast pace is washing away our memories. Aren’t your memories worth it?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.