Daily Reminders Using the Reminders or Calendar Apps

You can create daily reminders to do things like take pills using either the Reminders app or the Calendars app. Figure out which one is best for you.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can setup daily reminders using either the Reminders App or the Calendar App on your Apple devices. 
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So let's say you need to setup a daily reminder. For instance maybe to take a pill at the same time everyday. Now there are two main options to do that using your Mac and your other Apple devices. One is to use the Reminders app. The other is to use the Calendar App. Let's look at how to do it in each one of those and which one is probably best. 
First let's start with the Reminders app. Now in the Reminders app you have a list here to the left and then you can have items in the list. Now, I think unless you already have a list of daily reminders, you probably want to start a new one. Maybe one specific to whatever it is you're doing. So I'm going to create a new list and I'm going to call it Daily Reminders. I can add a color here or change the icon. I'm actually going to use an emoji. I'm going to search for pill. You can already see it there and use the Pill emoji and I'm going to set it up here with this color and now I've got a nice little icon there for it. It says Daily Reminders. Now, let's add the reminder. I'll click here to do that and I'm going to add something like Take Pill and let's say I want to do that every night at 9:00. So I'm going to click here and I'm going to say, Reminder Me On Day, and I'll just leave today's date there. Then I'll say At Time and I'm going to put the time. So let's do 9:00 and PM. Then I'm going to set Repeat. Now I could set it to repeat daily and then Done. It will repeat everyday.
But I could also customize it to do say Only Weekdays, Only Weekends, or I could go to Custom. I go to Custom I could set it up for Weekly and choose the days. So, for instance, say if there was a pill I need to take but I only need to do it five days a week I could set it up like that. Now I'll use OK and now you can see it describes exactly what days I'm going to be notified on. That's basically it. I can add notes here if I need to. But basically I'm going to get this reminder now at 9:00 PM. It will show up as a notification and, assuming I'm using iCloud of course for Reminders, then I should get that on my iPhone as well as any other Apple devices using the same Apple ID. 
Now let's try it instead using the Calendar app. So in the Calendar app you can set it up in a similar way. I'm going to create a new Calendar to hold this. If you only have one calendar here, which a lot of people may, then if you add this, a daily event, to that calendar it's going to clutter things up a lot. I'm going to create a new calendar and, since I'm using iCloud, I want it be under iCloud. Let me call this Daily Reminders. You could set it to something like Medical, or Pills, or anything like that. I'm going to select it here so that when I add a new event it's going to be added for this calendar. I'm going to double-click on the day I want this to start, say right here, and create this new event. I could add notes here and everything if I want to. Hopefully the description here is enough. Now I want it to Repeat. So I'm going to click here on the line underneath the date where it says Repeat there and I could set this up first for the time I want it. Let's say 9:00 PM and I'm going to set the end time for exactly the same. Then I'm going to set Alert To, and I could do everyday or I could go to Custom just like I could with Reminders. Here if I set the frequency to Weekly I could describe something like five days a week if I wanted to. So it is up to me. I could see it appear here and now I've got it set. If I look here I could see exactly why I created this in a separate calendar. 
Look at how this is now filling up my calendar here. Well by having this in a separate calendar I could simply Uncheck it and it Hides it. So I'm going to get the Alerts and everything from it but it's not going to be showing here. It's not going to clutter up my calendar. Any time I want to check this set of daily reminders I can turn it On and see it in there. Now let's take a look what happens when you use one of these. I'm going to double-click here, go back into it, and I'm going to click in there again. I'm going to set the Alert to something. So, I'm going to set it at Time of Event and notice when I'm changing one of these it is asking me if I want to change just this one or all of them. So I want to do All. But this is going to come in very handy. I'll show you in a minute. So I'll do All. So Alert at the Time of Event. Now what is it going to do. It's going to send me a notification just like Reminders would except it is going to come from the Calendar app instead of the Reminders app.
Now I can go down here to Custom and customize that. Here you could see it said to Message with Sound and at the Time of Event. That's fine. But, notice I could also have it send me an email. Now I want it to send me the notification so I'm going to just leave it like that. But notice here I can use this Plus button to add a second alert. So the second alert I could set that for Custom and set that one to email. Now what it is going to do there is going to send an email to me. So whatever in my Contacts app is set as my card. If I had more than one email address I can change that there. Then I can set it to how many minutes before. I'll say zero minutes before, so at the time of the event. OK. So you can see I've got two alerts. One is the standard notification and another is an email. The reason I'm doing that is because I'm very email oriented. So if something  appears in my Inbox at 9:00 every night you can bet that I'm going to see that before I go to bed, probably shortly after 9:00. Whereas an alert I might easily miss. Having both there is no problem. This might be important enough that you might want to have two notifications like this. So that is one advantage of using Calendar over Reminders. You can have more than one notification. The second one can happen ten minutes later if you're in the habit of dismissing a notification and then forgetting to actually do the action. Or the second one could be, say, an email message. 
Email alerts are a little tricky modern day when we've got multiple devices capable of doing that. This will sync up with my other Macs which will also try to send me email. So I might get more than one email. That's fine. I'd rather have to dismiss two emails than forget the important event. 
Now here's another advantage to Calendar. Let's say that it is June 1st and I've already accomplished this. I've already done it maybe a half hour early because it was convenient. I can select this, Delete. I can choose Delete Only this Event. Now it disappears. I won't get that notification or that email at 9:00 because I've removed it. I could do that way into the future. For instance over here I could say, well I'm not supposed to take my pill that day for some reason. So I can delete it just for that event.  Or maybe I want to Move this one over here and take it on a different day. I can change that. So you can modify things in the future and remove or add events. I can even Option drag to make a copy of this and you could see this one is here for 9:00 PM. It's all independent by itself. But it was easy for me to actually Add that event to this particular day. Note that if at some point I want to change this, like from this day on, to another time. So let's do 9:30 here. I can do that and you could see I could change it for all future events. So it's not changing any of those past events but starting on this day everything going into the future is now going to be a 9:30 event instead of a 9:00 event. 
So you've got a lot more control for what you get in the future when you use a special Calendar and have a repeating calendar event. So for me it makes the Calendar a winner in setting up things like this over the Reminders app. So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “Daily Reminders Using the Reminders or Calendar Apps”

Ken

2 years ago

Gary, Always nice to watch a video with just a simple theme. Makes you think of other ways of using apps that we use everyday, which is why we use our computer all the time. Thank you.

Dan W.

I assume this is with ios16? If I create a reminder on my calendar on my mac running Monterey with the email option and an alert, I notice on my iPhone with ios15, that the calendar shows it as two alerts, no email option. I don't see the custom option on my iPhone with ios15.

Gary Rosenzweig

Dan: This video is for macOS, not iOS, and it is for the current version of macOS (Monterey). The email option is for Mac, not iPhone.

Gary, thanks, I understand it is for MacOS. My point is that if you create the calendar entry on the mac with both an email and alert as you did, it shows up on the phone as two alerts, since things are synced across. The email alert doesn't sync to the iphone as an email alert.
The other interesting thing is when I set up an entry on my calendar on the mac with both an email alert and a notification, I get two email alerts. Not sure why yet.

Dan: Do you have two Macs? If so, it would sync across to both and both Macs would send you an email.

Dan W

Yep, that must be the reason. Thanks.

Allen Cohen

I hope these features sync with Google Calendar (events and reminders).

marcia

Love it! This is going to be a game changer in our family. Thank you Gary!

One question. Is there a way to get these reminders as a text message?

marcia: Not a good way. You may be able to do it creating a Shortcut in the Shortcuts app that sends a message, and then triggering it via a Calendar alert that runs the "app" it creates. But it would rely on your Mac being on (and I think awake) so it wouldn't be reliable. But a notification is a notification. What difference does it make if the notification is from the Reminders or Calendar apps, or the Messages app?

Tom

Question regarding the calendar for reminders. I did add a "new" calendar (in the iCloud) for a specific reminder. However all the other calendar events are in that new calendar. so I unchecked all the other calendars but all those events are still there in that new calendar. What did I do wrong?

Tom: Look carefully. A new calendar would be completely empty. Perhaps you simply had that calendar and your other calendar both checked so it showed both? Use the colors to differentiate, or simply uncheck the other calendar to only see your new one.

Comments Closed.

Daily Reminders Using the Reminders or Calendar Apps

Comments: 12 Responses to “Daily Reminders Using the Reminders or Calendar Apps”

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