Creating Regular Repeating Reminders

You can create reminders on your iPhone or Mac that will repeat on a regular schedule. Reminders can repeat hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and with all kinds of patterns such as specific days of the week or the nth day of every month.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to set repeating reminders on your iPhone and your Mac. 
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So you can use the Reminders App for To Do Lists and for setting items that have a due date and time and you'll get a Notification then. But you can also have these notifications repeat everyday, every week, every month in a certain pattern. Let me show you how to do it. 
So here on the iPhone let's go into the Reminders App. I'll go into a list here and then I'll create a new reminder by tapping here at the bottom. Now let's just call this Test and let's set this up to give us a notification. I'm going to tap the i here and one of the things I can do is set it to have a date or time. So let's do both. For date we'll just start with today and time I'll just pick a time here. Let's say 3 in the afternoon. Now at this point we would just get a notification today at 3 o'clock. That's when the item is due. But we could set this to be a repeating notification by tapping here. You get a bunch of choices. So you could have this repeat hourly so it will start at 3 p.m. and then you'll get a notification every hour after that. Or you can have it do it daily. So everyday at 3 p.m.. Weekdays, so Monday through Friday 3 p.m.. Saturday and Sunday 3 p.m. would be weekends. Weekly would be the same day every week. So today, for instance when I'm recording this, is a Wednesday. So every Wednesday I would get this. You could also do biweekly. So every other week. Monthly would be on the same day of the month every month. You could have every three months, every six months, or every year. So the same day every year you could get this reminder.
But if you really want full control go to Custom. Custom allows you to set the frequency here to hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. Depending upon what you select the bottom changes. So, for instance, if I select weekly you could see I could select the days of the week. So if I want to be reminded on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I could just check those. If I change to monthly I'll get a Calendar. So I can say have a reminder on the first and the sixteenth or each month like that. I could even change it to be every other month or every third month. For yearly I get to pick which month it occurs. So I could have it be every February and November and May. I could even bring up days of the week and have it be something like the first or second or third Tuesday of each month. If I go back up to hourly I could do every hour or every other hour, every fifth hour. Whatever I want. Finally for daily I could also select every day, every other day, every third day, etc. 
So let's set it for weekly and say we want Monday, Wednesday, and Friday reminders. Now when we go back to details here it will say there's a custom repeat there. The time is still going to be 3 p.m.. So we're going to get it at 3 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every week. Now you could also set an end repeat here. So I can have it repeat forever or have a end repeat date. So here I can go into the future and say I want this to only go to the end of February next year. 
So as you can see you really have so much control over these reminders. Even more so than how you can have things repeat in the Calendar App. 
Now you can actually do the same thing in the Reminders App on the Mac. So, for instance here I've setup a reminder called Test. I could click on the Info button here and then I can have it remind me on a day at a time and then I can have it repeat just like on the iPhone. So there are the same options here. I can also select Custom and I can change from daily to weekly and then select the days. I can go monthly and select the days for each month or on the first, second, third and then day of the week. Yearly I can select the calendar months that I want to be reminded and then have it be on the first, fifth, last, whatever day of that week. Even including things like weekday and weekend day. Of course it's important to have the same functionality on both the iPhone and on the Mac because they sync over iCloud. So you could set it up on one and as long as you're using iCloud for Reminders then you should have that reminder appear on both devices. This works, of course, on the iPad as well. 
So I wouldn't use these for very critical things. I would use the Calendar instead. For instance remembering to pay your taxes on a certain day of the year. But for smaller things like reminding you to take a break, reminding you to call somebody every week, or check something every other day, they are really useful for that. In fact creating a dedicated listener in the Reminders App and putting all of these in there or maybe tagging them with the new macOS Monterey tagging feature is a good idea so you can see all of your repeated reminders together.  
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Creating Regular Repeating Reminders”

DonO

2 years ago

One consequence of an iOS reminder that repeats, especially on older versions of iOS -- You'll soon get a ton of completed reminders that can slow down the Reminders app, or make it less reliable. Solution: Clear completed reminders regularly. Gary - I think the 'clear' option is new-ish, at least to me. How about a video specifically on clearing completed reminders? Do you have any new / better info on this?

Thomas Benson

Thanks for the lesson for using reminders. I would always use calendars but this is so much better. Thank you… Again!

Gary Rosenzweig

DonO: Clearing them when you get them works best. But grouping them means they will still only take up one spot. Or, don't even have them in Notifications Center at all.

Comments Closed.

Creating Regular Repeating Reminders

Comments: 3 Responses to “Creating Regular Repeating Reminders”

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