Reminders In the Calendar App

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at how you can see your Reminders in the Calendar App on your Mac. 

So there are two main apps you have on your Mac and other Apple devices that allow you to schedule things. One is, of course, the Calendar App. You can put an event at a specific time or date. Also you've got the Reminders App that is for tasks where you have no date or time associated with them at all but also ones that do, say they have a due date or time where you should be doing that task. When you've got something that has a specific time it can be confusing which one should you use. Should you use the Reminders app and put it in there or should you put it as an event in the Calendar app. 

In general think of the Calendar App as a place you put events. Things were other people are involved. Something you attend, for instance. Where the Reminders App is more about tasks. Things that you need to do and often these don't have a specific time associated with them. They're just things you need to do at some point. Sometimes they do have a due date or a specific time you need to be doing that task. In that case you can create a reminder with a time. When you do that you can also see there those reminders in the Calendar app so you don't have to decide what it goes in to. You can do it as a reminder and also see it in the Calendar app. 

So here I've got both the Reminders and the Calendar Apps open. In the Reminders App, in the default list, I've got three different items. Two of them have a dates and one has the date and time assigned to it. While the other one has no date or time assigned to it. I have another list called Work Tasks and I have one item in here that has a date and time and a due date for this whereas the other one has no date and time assigned to it. So I've got three total items in Reminders that have either dates or dates and times. 

Now in the Calendar App I've got a few events here. It would be nice to be able to see these Reminder's items also on the Calendar. You Can! What you want to do is you want to look for Schedule Reminders under Other here. If you don't see the sidebar here go to View and then you've got Show and Hide Calendar List item there. If you don't see the items under Other you may have to expand it, like that. Then simply make sure that Schedule Reminders is turned On. When I do that you'll see these things appear. So you'll see the two items here from my Reminders List and there's that third item, the one from that Work Tasks lists there. These will appear here and they will mirror what you see in Reminders. So you get to see the same item in both places. 

Now this is a new feature that started with macOs Sequoia and also on the iPhone and iPad iOS 18. So you have to have those versions or newer. You can turn Schedule Reminders on and off as you like. So if you've got a ton of different reminders here and it clutters your Calendar you can have it off usually and then maybe turn it on when you want to focus on getting some things done and you want to see Reminders along side your events. 

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You can add a new reminder using either app. So here in the Reminders App I'll go to Work Tasks here and I'm going to add another work task with the Plus Button and I'll add something here. Notice it does not appear at all in the Calendar because there is no date for this. You need to select the information for this Calendar event. You need to at least add a date. So let's add February 23 as the date. Leave off the time if you like or you can add a time as well. Let's do 11:00 a.m. So now this has a date and time and you can see it added it to the Calendar there. 

Likewise you can use the Calendar App to add a reminder as well. So let's switch your reminders to the Reminders List. We see that. Let's go to Calendar here and I'm going to double click on this day, right there, and you can see I can add a new event.  But I can also switch to adding a Reminder. You look and see this interface looks very different. As a matter of fact it's identical to the full editing interface you get in the Reminders App even though I'm still in the Calendar App here. So I'll add a reminder here and you can see since I've double clicked on a date it already filled in the date and time. I can change that if I want. So let's change that to 10:00 and I can also select which list it appears in. So I've got the three lists that appear here. I've going to leave it in the Reminders List, but you can set it to another one if you like. 

When I'm done you can see it appears here in Calendar but it also appears here in Reminders. It is not correct to say it added it to both in both places. It added one thing. A reminder to your Reminders database and you're now reviewing it in both the Reminder app and the Calendar app. So if you were to change something, like let's change that one that we just created here. I will change the date to the 23rd. You can see how it changes here in both places. I can do the same thing in the Calendar. I can double click on the Reminder in the Calendar here. I've got this window here and I can change it. Let's change it to the 25th here and you can see how it moves over there and the date changes here in Reminders. 

There's also another way to add a reminder in  the Calendar App.  You don't have to double click on a day here. You can click on the Plus button and you see you get New Event. Or you can click here and it goes to the Reminders interface here to add a new reminder in the Calendar App. Also note when you delete a reminder here in the Calendar, I've got this one selected, I'll press the Delete key on my keyboard. It is deleted here as well because it is only one thing, just viewed in both places. I'll delete this one and you can see how it is deleted off of here as well. Also you can move things by dragging them in the Calendar app you can move it to another day and you can see how it updates there. 

Now what about completing items. Obviously in the Reminders App you've completed an item by simply clicking on the little circle there and then it is marked as completed and will go away unless you have Show enabled here where it will show the completed items. In the Calendar you have the same thing. Under View look here and you can Show Completed Reminders. So you can the completed reminder here independently of whether or not you've seen the completed reminder here. You can uncheck it either place and it affects both places, of course. Any other changes will be reflected in both places because again it is just one item that you're updating to either app. So, for instance, if I wanted to take this and move it to my regular reminders list I can do that with Drag & Drop. Notice here the color changes. So this blue color here reflects the fact that it is in this list which had a blue color here. If I change the Reminders List to be orange it will update here as well as in the Reminders App. This one has a red circle because it is in the Work Tasks list which has a red color. 

Now one last detail is what if you have a repeating reminder. Let's create a repeating reminder called Repeat Test. I'll recall on the Info Button here and I'll set a date and I'll have be a certain time, 11:00 a.m. I will select for Repeat, Repeat Weekly. So it is going to repeat every Monday, like that. In the Calendar I'll see the current one as a full regular item here in the Calendar App. Then a dimmed out version of that for everyone after it. If I were to complete this one. in either app like this, notice how the next one becomes active. If I were to select this one and delete it, I can say delete this reminder only or I can say delete all future reminders and I can say skip that week and here you can see this one is the next active one. 

It's not perfect. Like if I say oh no if I click this one here and I want to unblock it, you can see this one still remains the active one here while the other ones are grayed out. But more or less it works as you would expect. Of course Repeating Reminders Test are going to make your calendar look even more crowded so you're probably going to want to toggle this one on and off as needed, even more if you've got those. Not only does this work on the iPhone and iPad as well in a similar way using the Reminders and Calendar App there. But if your Calendars are saved in iCloud then doing this on one device does it on all of them. So, having a new reminder added on your Mac you'll be able to see that in the Calendar on your iPhone as long as you've got Scheduled Reminders enabled there as well. So in the Calendar App on my iPhone here I've won't see these events unless I go down here to the Calendar button and I turn On Scheduled Reminders. Then I'll see those items appear there just like on the Mac. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.