How To Use Repeating Reminders

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Repeating Reminders. 

So Repeating Reminders, in the Reminders App on your Mac and also your iPhone and iPad, can be used for things a little different than the standard To Do Tasks that you might use Reminders for. 

The basic idea is you create a new reminder, I'll do so here with the Plus Button at the top but you can also use File, New Reminder. Now, you can set a name for the Reminder, Notes, Tags, you can add a date and then time, and other things. But if you want the full set of controls, including the Repeating Controls, you want to click the little i button here, and then you get this dialogue. You can set all of the same stuff here. So, I can set a name, like this, and I can set a date, like today, and a time, like the beginning of the next hour. I can also set the Repeat right here. By default it is set to Never. A standard item in Reminders basically just has a single date and time, if you even assign it that, and that's when you get a notification. But you can have Repeat and you can see there are tons of options here. You can have it repeat hourly, daily, and so on. There's even a custom setting here that we'll look at in a minute. 

So, as an example, a standard thing you may want to have the Reminder do is repeat daily. When you do that the Reminder will trigger the notification just like it normally would. But when you Dismiss it the Reminder will then just simply change the time to be the same time the next day. For instance, let's set this to the beginning of the current hour. So in other words the task is already overdue. So you can see here now it shows that it was due at 10:00 a.m. but it is past 10:00 a.m. If I were to click the circle here showing that the task has been completed and then simply wait you could see it changes to tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. That's basically how it works. In fact if the task time hasn't yet gotten there, like I set it for 11:00 a.m. and it is not yet 11:00 a.m. I can click that circle and it will set itself for tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. If, instead, I let the time go by and maybe several days go by, it will still show the original overdue time of several days ago. But when I click the circle it will then reset to the time for tomorrow. 

You can have many of these. So let's look at an example of how to use it. Let's create a new list and we'll call this Medications. Say we want to have notifications each day when we should take pills. So, now that we've got this list setup, we'll create a reminder for this list. We'll just call it Pill One here and we'll set it for a start date of today. A time, let's say of this evening. So instead of 11:00 a.m. we'll set it to 9:00 p.m. Like that. But we're going to set it to Repeat Daily. Let's select it here and I'm going to do Command C to Copy and Command V to Paste. So I've got two pills here to be taken at 9:00 p.m. everyday. Of course one of these could be set for a different time, or maybe one pill needs to be taken at 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. I can simply have these be the same pill that I'm taking, just two different times. 

So you can set this up with all your medications and other things that you need to repeat everyday. Besides medications this is also very useful as a habit tracker. So if there's certain things you want to remember to do everyday, like exercise or call your mother, you can set those up to repeat daily. If you're early, so you decide to take the pill earlier that day, you can check it, like that, and you can see it will automatically move to tomorrow. 

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Now it doesn't have to be everyday. For instance, let's set a Daily Reminder here for checking your mail. So we'll set a date, starting with today, and we'll set a time and let's say we know that 3:00 p.m. is usually when the mail arrives. We'll have it repeat daily. So those will be everyday. But we don't need this, say, on Sunday, right? Or even the whole weekend. We can go to Custom. With Custom we set the Frequency to Weekly. Now we can select this specific days, like that. It would only be on those days. Notice we could also have chosen Week Days or Weekends here from the list to quickly get to that. But we have Ultimate Customization here with the Custom Setting because we could, for instance have it be everyday but Sunday. Or we can have it be, say, just 3 days a week. 

Now another thing you could do with Reminders is you could set it for Hourly. So, for instance, if you want to make sure you stay hydrated you can have a reminder for drinking water. You could set it for a date starting with today and you can set it for a time. So we have it start first thing. Then we can have it Repeat hourly, like that. Now, we'll get an hourly reminder. So notice I'm overdue on this one. If I were to click to check it, it would now set itself for the beginning of the next hour. So this is great for habit tracking, for remembering to drink water, for standing up at your desk, for remembering to start at the window and contemplate your existence, things like that that you want to do throughout the day. 

The downside here is when you set it for hourly, it's 24 hours. So you can't set it to be, say, from 9 to 5 or 9 to 9. It's going to continue even in the middle of the night. But Focus Mode should take care of the notifications. If you have an iPhone set to go into Sleep Mode of just change Focus Modes in the evening and at night, it shouldn't bother you with the notification. Then in the morning when you take your first drink you check that off and then it will go to the next hour. 

Another thing you can do is have Reminders that repeat less frequently than daily or even weekly. So, let's create a new List here and call this one Home Maintenance. In this list I'm going to add items that I need to do around the house, like this for instance. We can set this one to start, say, at some point in the future, like maybe the first of next month. Like that. We can have it repeat and say we want it to repeat either weekly, biweekly, monthly, or less. If we go to Custom and we go to Monthly, we have a lot of options. For instance we can have this repeat on the 15th of each month. Or we can select this area here and say we want it to be on the first Saturday of every month. Or the first weekday or weekend day of any month like that. So here I can select that it's done on June 1st and then it will automatically go to the first weekend day of the month and then once that's checked off it will go to the first weekend day of the next month. So you can create a whole list there of things you need to do every month. 

The great thing about repeating reminders is that you have the option to wait for the notification to come and then you can click it and it will go to the next one, or you can click in advance if you remember to do the thing the day before or the week before. Whenever and it will go to the next one even though you haven't gotten to that specific time and date yet. You can even do longer periods of time. If I go to Custom here I can set the frequency to yearly and I can set something up where, say, in January and in July on the first Saturday I'm going to get reminded of this. You could also set Daily but have it be every so many days. So something could be every ten days. It's not going to rely on specific days of the week or how long each month is. 

Now this doesn't cover all situations. Like I mentioned before, you can't set something to alert you every hour from 9 to 5. You kind of have to just ignore the last one if you want hourly like that. You also can't have it do different times on different days. But you always have the solution to set multiple reminders if you really want to. So, for instance, you can have a reminder for Monday through Friday at 9:00 a.m. and then just copy and paste that reminder and change it to be Saturday and Sunday at 10:00 a.m. if you want a different time for the weekend. Technically you can do the same thing for hourly from 9:00 to 5:00. You can set eight to nine different reminders, one for each hour, set to repeat everyday at that certain hour. Then you could easily then only have those be Monday through Friday, for example. It all depends on how much effort you want to put into it. 

So I hope this gives you some ideas about how you can use the Reminders App for repeating events. Thanks for watching.