FAQs & Privacy | Hassl.me

When can I expect my hassles?

Roughly every X days that you specify.
The roughly is calculated randomly within a range of ±20-30%.
Reminders are only sent out during UK waking hours Monday through Saturday.

What is the history of this site?

Hassl.me was created by Harry Fear, who was a noughties user of HassleMe, UK group MySociety’s lifehack reminding tool. A decade on in 2022 and this tool is still unlike other modern to-do or reminder tools because of its slightly timing-irregular reminders. So Harry coded this replica site in a couple of hours one day in summer 2022.

Someone else apparently had the idea to revive the original HassleMe.co.uk domain, and did so between December 2021 and March 2022 — however, that site sadly has been monetised to upsell gambling and the actual reminder tool appears not to work at all! Hassl.me is therefore the only resurrected version of the original MySociety HassleBot, put together in an open-source spirit that Chris Lightfoot would hopefully have approved of. What's more, it's functional freeware and completely unmonetized, just like the original tool was.

Here's some press for the old HassleBot:

lifehacker plug in 2006: "reminders are meant to come at irregular intervals to keep you on your toes about a task"
lifehacker plug in 2007: "appropriate for tasks that you know you should be doing but just keep forgetting to actually do"
Apassion.com.au plug in 2008: "great for follow up"
Gretchen Rubin plug in 2008 (crossposted to Huff Post): "The trick is not to get used to seeing the reminder arrive"
Journalism.co.uk plug in 2009: "recommends this handy site"
anthill plug in 2009: "enter a recurring message to yourself and set the time intervals between reminders"
The Repository plug mentioned under money tips in 2009: "Let your computer do the prodding"
TwittleTattle tweet in 2009: "Hassle yourself to do the right thing"
The Economic Times of India plug in 2011: 'easy free service requiring no registration'
Paul Clarke Tweets in 2011: "it's surprisingly effective"
Carlease Burke tweet in 2012
All Women's Talk listacle in 2016

What’s next?

On the roadmap for this web app is to:

~~Self-service deactivation of hassls.~~ DONE, July 2024
Account registration and self-management of all hassls by email address.
Inherit legacy design from HassleMe.
Inherit ‘publicly visible’ feature from HassleMe.
Allow email address rotation as with the old HassleMe.
User timezone support so that hassls are only sent out within a user's time zone, rather than the UK server’s timezone.

What’s your privacy policy?

Simply, we hold as little information as possible.
This means we store your email address, your hassle reminder text and delay and timestamp. No, we don’t share these details with third parties.
To improve email servicing we sometimes log messages we send. In the process of performance monitoring or debugging, we may encounter or store your IP address for the purposes of improving this software.
We also use Google Analytics to see how many people are using our site. Google Analytics will store what it has to in order to gauge understand usage of this site.