‘Bring Me’ is an app that helped me to keep track of my essentials

It is super frustrating when you’re running late and you find out you’ve forgotten your earphones, or worse, your wallet at home half-way through. As someone who tends to be a bit forgetful, I’ve endured that pain, more than a few times.

As someone who also happens to travel a lot, there’s an additional challenge I face – knowing where my forgotten items are at any point in time.  To get more organised, I have been looking at apps that will help me solve these two issues, and finally, there’s one that solves one of them.

Meet ‘Bring Me’ – an app that helps me log the location of all the items I carry (or should be carrying) around. Here’s what the app does and how I found use for it.

What is Bring Me?

Bring Me is a logging app, that takes the checklist concept and takes it up a ntoch. It’s not a perfect solution, but it gets pretty close. Here’s how.

The app lets you make a list of things you carry around, and offers a ‘With me’ button next to each of these items. All you need to do when this is set up for all your items, is tap on the ‘With me’ button and get going.

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The app will log in the location, time and even an optional picture of said item. This offers two perks. First, the list of your items in the app becomes your checklist, and gives you a neat look at everything that you shouldn’t leave behind.

Second, logging also lets you track anything that you do accidentally leave behind or lose. For instance, If I reach the office and can’t find my wallet in the bag, I can quickly head to the app and see if I left it at home. If I did, I needn’t ponder over whether I was pickpocketed on the way.

What I thought of Bring Me

The app has a very clean and minimalistic interface that is super easy to understand and navigate. The design made creating, organising and updating my lists hassle-free. The simple UI also means there’s a very quick learning curve here, ideal for older smartphone users.

After installing the app, all I had to do was tap on the ‘+’ sign to add my items to the list. I could also create different lists depending on categories like work, or travel, or even of the things that I’ve loaned out to others.

Once an item is added to the list, the app displays the ‘Last Time Updated’ which shows you the exact date and time of when you had that item with you. It also shows you the exact ‘Last Known Location’, down to the latitude and longitude.

There’s also a map view, and a location history page to go through, along with the ability to add notes or images. This helped me keep track of my similar-looking items with the same name, such as my home and car keys.

A couple of arrows next to each item’s card also helped me easily move them around by order of priority. I also loved how all the features were completely free to use.

What could have been better

While everything mentioned above was super-handy, there were a few missing elements that I felt could have made the app even better. The first of these is a search bar.

Once I add plenty of items, going through them using only scrolling does feel rather primitive at times, and a search bar would have made the process much quicker and more efficient. The ability to colour-code items would have also helped with organisation.

The app could have also used some mechanism to actually remind me to check my items when I leave from office or home. While those with an iPhone can leverage the Shortcuts app for a couple of automations, there’s no native support for something like this, and checking the boxes of each item remains a task that you have to remember.

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Regardless, Bring Me’s logging abilities and features like map view do make up for the functionality it lacks right now, and the app did help me keep track of my stuff better.

How to get the Bring Me app

Bring Me is completely free to use and is available for both Android phones and iPhones. It can also be used on tablets including Apple’s iPads.

Do try this app if you wish to be more organised and need help with keeping track of your daily essentials.