I welcomed Google’s friendly advice for a few days, but after a while, I would be caught entirely off guard by it. When focusing deeply on a task in complete silence, my Hub would abruptly shout at me and scare the crap out of me, causing my heart to skip a beat. Not only did it break my peace, but it caused me to lose my train of thought as well. When this happens several times a day and every single day for weeks, you realize that it’s more of a nuisance than a help, I promise. //

The worst part is that since the feature is called ‘Workday Reminders’, and since Google Assistant has about a gazillion settings packed into one wall of text, I kept searching for the settings to disable them in various places other than Routines. I checked Reminders (because duh), I checked my Nest Hub settings, and so on all to no avail. After a few weeks of torture, and having only attained peace by unplugging my Assistant devices, I finally located the Workday ‘routine’ blandly mixed in with the other routines. No longer did it feature the colorful icon it had when I set them up – instead, it was a simple blue outlined icon mixed in with the rest. It was completely indistinguishable. I really am beginning to see what people are saying about Google’s design becoming less attention-grabbing and more ‘same-y’.