Open your reminders list and count how many look the same. A chain that needs lube this week sits in the same size, same weight, same colour as a bearing service that isn't due for another eight months. Nothing on the page tells you which one to act on first, so more often than not you act on neither. The list gets a glance, a flicker of guilt, and closed again.
That's not a discipline problem, it's a design problem, and it was true of Componentry's own reminders until a few weeks ago. A list that treats every entry as equally important quietly trains you to treat every entry as equally optional. Reminders have just been rebuilt around a different idea: a reminder should tell you how urgently something needs you, right now, not just when it happens to be due.
A flat list trains you to ignore it
Most reminder systems, in and out of cycling, are organised by date and nothing else. Sort by due date and a chain lube due tomorrow sits one line above a full overhaul due in March. Visually, they carry identical weight. The only way to tell them apart is to read every line and do the maths yourself, and most people, most weeks, don't.
Distance and usage-based tasks made this worse. A reminder that fires "every 3,000 km" has no date at all until it's calculated for you, so it tends to drop to the bottom of a date-sorted list, or get filed into its own separate tab, disconnected from whatever maintenance is genuinely next. That's backwards for a lot of bike upkeep: a chain three rides from its wear limit is often more urgent than a brake bleed still eight months out, but a plain date sort has no way to say so.
Componentry's reminders page used to have close to this exact problem: three separate tabs, near-identical styling on every entry, distance-based reminders treated as a different kind of information instead of ranked against everything else. Riders would say some version of the same thing: I have reminders, I just don't look at them.
Four states, not one list
Every reminder now falls into one of four states: Overdue, Due Soon, Upcoming, or Scheduled. That's the whole taxonomy. Overdue means deal with it now. Due Soon means deal with it soon. Upcoming means keep an eye on it. Scheduled means don't think about it yet.
The reminders page is a single list grouped in that order, showing only the sections you actually have entries in, so there's no tab to remember to check. On the dashboard, the reminders card goes further and shows only what's genuinely close: on mobile, that means anything overdue, due soon, or landing within a week, 300 km, or three rides. Anything further out waits quietly on the bike's own list instead of crowding the card.
Distance and ride-count reminders now rank in the same list as dated ones, on the same urgency scale, rather than sitting in a separate section or defaulting to the bottom. A chain 30 km from its wear limit reads as urgent next to a service due next week, not filed away under a different heading. Each line is coloured by its own trigger too, so a glance tells you whether it's a date, a distance, or a ride count doing the demanding. A chain closing in on its interval doesn't tint the date sitting next to it.
A couple of smaller details matter more than they look. A repeating reminder you've already completed reads as Scheduled everywhere it appears, rather than resurfacing as overdue against its old due date in one place while showing as done in another. And a paused reminder sits quietly under Scheduled with a Paused label, rather than sounding urgent or inflating the count on your bike. Pausing something now actually removes it from your attention instead of just hiding it one tap deeper.
Mobile got this system a day ahead of the web app, and both now agree with each other: the same reminder reads the same state wherever you check it.
An urgency system is only as honest as its dates
None of this sorting means anything if the dates feeding it are wrong, and that's turned out to be the less visible half of the work. Over the last couple of weeks, several fixes underneath reminders have been about exactly that.
Distance reminders now move on properly once they come due, rolling forward to their next interval instead of getting stuck on the one that just fired. A batch of distance reminders that had quietly come due without ever surfacing are showing again, worth a check if you rely on them and haven't looked lately. And for repeating reminders generally, the next occurrence is now calculated from the day you actually complete the task, not the day it was originally due. Finish a service five days early or two days late and the next one falls a full interval from when you did the work, not from the date the calendar originally picked.
An urgency system built on unreliable dates is just a differently organised way to be wrong. Getting the states right only mattered once the dates underneath them could be trusted.
Setting up reminders you'll actually act on
The urgency system does the sorting, but it can only sort what you give it. A few things worth getting right from the start:
- Match the trigger to the failure mode. Chain wear and tyre tread scale with distance, so track them by distance. Brake fluid and cable stretch happen on a clock regardless of how much you ride, so track those by time. A distance reminder on a bike that mostly sits in the garage over winter will always understate how urgent a time-driven part actually is.
- Let presets do the first pass. Adding a component now creates its suggested reminders automatically unless you turn them off. Start there, then adjust intervals based on your own conditions rather than building a list from nothing.
- Reminders belong on the component, not just the bike. A bike-wide reminder suits an annual tune-up, but a specific chain, cassette, or set of brake pads deserves its own reminder tied to that part, especially across more than one bike, where "replace the chain" means nothing in particular when there are three.
- Weigh safety above performance. Brakes and anything structural earn a shorter interval and less tolerance for "I'll get to it." A dirty cassette costs a few watts; a brake pad worn past its wear line costs considerably more if you've misjudged how much was left.
- Don't recreate the flat list by hand. Giving every reminder the same advance-notice window puts you back where you started, just with better colours. A safety-critical item deserves more lead time than a chain lube you can finish in ten minutes on the day it comes due.
Completing a reminder adds to that component's maintenance history and, where it applies, updates its condition: the same record covered in why your service history is your resale value, not a separate list kept twice.
Where to find it
Reminders live on their own page in the web app and on your bike's detail screen on mobile, with overdue ones called out directly against the component they belong to. For the full walkthrough of creating, assigning, and completing reminders, see the reminders documentation.
Reminders pay off fastest once there's more than one bike or more than a handful of components to track. See how to track maintenance across two or more bikes for that picture, and what a worn drivetrain actually costs for what's at stake when a reminder sits ignored for long enough.
Recommended Reading
- Reminders documentation - Setting up time-based, distance-based, and component-specific reminders.
- Your Service History Is Your Resale Value - Why completed reminders and service records compound into more than a to-do list.
- How to Track Bike Maintenance When You Own Two or More Bikes - Managing reminders and wear across a multi-bike stable.
- The Quick Maintenance Check - What to actually look at once a reminder tells you it's time.
- GCN Tech Maintenance Playlist - Filmed walkthroughs for the maintenance tasks your reminders will send you to.