How To Use Mac Reminders In 5 Minutes

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use the Reminders App.

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So the Reminders App is one of the default productivity apps on your Mac. It allows you to add items to it and get Notifications at certain times for those items or just refer to a list of items of things you need to accomplish or want to remember.

To add a new reminder you can click the Plus button at the top right, you can choose File, New Reminder, or Command N or just click in a blank area in the Reminders App, like this. Then you can type the title for the Reminder. You can just leave it as a title like this or you can add some notes. I may want to take this part out and add it here as a note instead of having it all be way in the title. You can also add a Date and Time to your reminder. When you do that you'll get a notification at the time that the task is due. So you can click here, choose one of the suggestions or you can just start typing, like this, and then press Return. After you add a Date you can add a Time if you like. Again, you can use one of the suggestions or you can type what you want. But you could also just have reminders that have no date and time. Like this one here. 

If you want to Edit a reminder just click on the title or click on the note or click on the time to edit it. So I can click here and you can see how I can edit everything. I can also click the i button here to the right to get details and it is a little easier sometimes to edit over here. Note you can also set things here like a Priority. For instance setting a Priority for this will give it some exclamation points to the left to make it stand out. 

When you want to mark a task as complete just click the little circle here. You'll see it filled in and after a few seconds it will go away. If you ever want to see the completed tasks you can go to View, Show Completed and then you'll see both Incomplete and Completed tasks there. This gives you the opportunity to uncheck that task. If you ever want to delete a task completely without marking it as completed you can simply select if by clicking near the circle but not on it like that and then press the Delete key on the keyboard.

You can keep all your Reminders here in this one list. But you could also create multiple lists. You can click the little Plus button here at the bottom left or choose File New List. Give it a name and then you can choose a color and either an emoji for an icon or one of these symbols. Click OK and now you see I've got multiple lists here. I can just select which one I want to see. 

If you want to quickly Add items to a list you can just type text and press Return. So you can do this, press return, type another one and keep going. You can rearrange items here by dragging them and you could see this blue line indicates where it will go. So I can move this one here to the top. You could also go to View and then Sort By. Sort the list like that. Notice you have some lists here at the top that will show you everything due today, anything that is scheduled listed by day. You could see all of the items from all of the lists together and also you can see any items that you Flagged. You can Flag an item by getting info on it and you could see a little flag right here. But also if you edit it there's a Flag Button you can click. Now you can see that is a flagged item. 

You could also group items together by using Tags. You see when you Edit something here you can click here and then type Tags starting with a hash symbol. You could see tags added here and if you click any of those you'll see all the items with that tag from any list. When dealing with lists you can also add Groups which are basically folders that you can use arrange your lists. You can drag another list inside of a group, for instance, if you would like. You could also use a Search Box here to search for any text in the title or notes across all of your lists. 

Note that a lot of these features rely on the fact that you're using iCloud for your Reminders. You can actually go to System Preferences and then Internet Accounts and check your iCloud Account here to make sure Reminders is checked. One of the most powerful things about using iCloud is you'll also see all of these reminders in the Reminders App in your iPhone and other Apple devices. So you can Edit them there as well as on your Mac and you'll always stay in sync. 

Here are some more advanced tips. 

- You can create a new Task and make it a subtask of an existing one. So, for instance I create a task like this and I can drag it onto this one and now it makes it a subtask of that one. It's easier to group them together that way. 

- You can use Siri to easily add a reminder like this. Gary says: Add butter to my grocery shopping list. Siri says: Done. 

- Maybe one of the best feature of Reminders is you can Share a list. So you can click on this little Share button next to the list name and then you can choose to Share it with somebody else over iCloud. So, for instance, you and your spouse could share this grocery shopping list. Both of you adding to it and marking items as completed. 

Hope you found this intro to using the Reminders App useful. Thanks for watching.