Reminders Smart Lists Tips And Tricks

Hi, this is Gary at MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Smart List in Reminders. 

Now in the Reminders App you've got lots of different ways to organize reminders. The main tool you've got is Lists. You can create multiple lists and put a reminder in a list. Then you have a list for work, a list for home, a list for shopping, a list for packing for a trip, that kind of thing. Or you can simply use lists for different projects you have at work, so not all your work tasks are thrown into one big list. Now you've also got other things. For instance each reminder can have a Priority set. Each reminder can have a date and time when it is due. Reminders can also have Tags. Tags can be used to organize just like Lists. The difference being that you can apply more than one tag to a reminder, whereas a reminder can only be in one List. 

Smart Lists is another tool for organization. They are a lot like Smart Folders in Finder or Smart Albums in Photos. It is basically a Search where you are searching for reminders that meet a certain criteria and then because you are saving that search you can repeat it easily. You can actually just go back to that list and it will automatically update with whatever reminders fit the criteria now.

So, for instance, here I've got a big reminders list. I've just thrown all sorts of reminders into my Reminders List even though I've got a couple of other lists here. Most of my reminders are just here. This can make it a little hard, actually, to look at all the different reminders and figure out what I should be working on right now. I need Smart List to help. So we're going to go to File and New List to create a Smart List. Notice there is Smart List here but it is inactive. New List is where you would go to create a Smart List and you would simply change the list type to Smart List. Now you have to assign a name first, an idiosyncrasy in Reminders is if you setup and Smart List and then go and assign a name it will kind of clear out a lot of things. So setup the list first. So let's say we want to setup a Smart List called Do Soon. This will be different than stuff that is due today or just is on the schedule. Maybe something that is due just in the next few days. Then you can choose a color. You can choose an icon, either an emoji or one of these symbols here. We've already set the list type to Smart List. 

Now we define Smart List. So, here we can select Include Reminders Matching Either All or Any of the following items. All would mean And. Everything here must be met. Whereas Any means only one of the things here has to be met. It doesn't really matter in this case since we're only going to use one criteria. That is going to be the Date. We're going to say Date is and we're going to say Relative Range. We're going to say it is going to be due within the next seven days. You can include anything past due as well. So we'll click Okay here and it creates this Do Soon List here. You can see it has picked out five different reminders and they all meet that criteria. You can define this how you like. Maybe you want seven days, maybe three days, maybe fourteen days and you can always go back and change it. You can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on this here and select Show Smart List Info and you can change it here. So I can change it to be five days, for instance. 

Now another example is Priority. Some of these items here have a priority set, high, medium, low, and so on. So if I wanted to see all the high priority items I could create a New List and I'll change it to a Smart List and I'll say Priority is High. Now High Priority shows me those items. Now here is where I want to point out a deficiency in Smart List.  It makes it not as powerful as the Smart Folders and Smart Albums on other places. If you go and Edit this and think you know what would be nice to be Priority High or Priority Medium you'll find there is no way to do that here and if you add another criteria you can't add Priority a second time. So if you say any of these then there is no way to say Priority High and Priority Medium. You're really restricted to what you can do. You can really only include each one of these things, Priority, Tags, Date, Time, Flag, Location in Lists one time in the List that defines the Smart List. 

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Now explore one of the most useful ways to use Smart List. If I go back to this main Reminders list here and have chosen to put everything in the same list and for good reason. I've got things that overlap in terms of what they do. I actually have just three tags as an example. But note that some of these items here have one tag, some of these items have none, some have two or even three because they belong to multiple categories. If I were to use separate lists for them I wouldn't know which list to put them in. If this one belongs in Project Alpha and In House would I put it in a list for In House or Project Alpha. So instead I just put it in the main Reminders List and assigned both tags to it. But what if I want to see just the In House Tag items. Well, this is where Smart Lists come in really handy because you can go and create one. I'll go and create this one called Project Alpha like that and I'll create a Smart List and what I'm going to say here is I want this to be for a Tag. Here, even though you can only define tags once you can actually have multiple tags in here. I'm only going to choose one now. I'm going to start typing here and it quickly narrows it down so I can find it easily and you can see I'm going to get a Smart List here that shows everything that has Project Alpha tagged. So a handy place to see all of the items tagged that way together and I can create other Smart lists for other things that have tags that are important. 

Now here's an important thing to get about Smart List. They are very much like Smart Folders in Finder, Smart Albums in Photos, and Smart Playlists in Music. Nothing is actually in them. They are a Search finding items that are elsewhere. Actually in a real list. So you cannot add something to a Smart List because a Smart List is actually define by what the results are of that search. The criteria you specify. Likewise, you can't delete an item from the Smart List because it is not a real place. It's just the results of a search. It is defined by the criteria. It is not a holding place. That's the regular list. This is just another way to view your Reminders. Once you understand that then you understand Smart Lists and Smart Folders, and Smart Albums, and Smart Playlists.

But here's the interesting thing that Smart List does that those others do not. You can use them as a way to assign a tag and some other information to an item. So, for instance, let me go back to Reminders here. Let's take a look at this item here. It has no tags added to it. Now you would think, based on how Smart Folders and other things work, that I should be able to drag this to a Smart List. After all a Smart List here is defined as anything with a tab Project Alpha. I can't just drag this into it and add it. But you could if doing so would actually add that tag. That's what it does. You can drag this here and what it does is it will add that tag to that item there, effectively adding it to the Smart List, but also changing that item so it shows up in the Smart List. You can do it with other things as well. For instance I can take this item here and drag it to that High Priority Smart List and guess what? Priority is now set too high for that. You can also drag to Do Soon and guess what? It is actually doing to assign a date to that based on the criteria there. So Smart Lists here aren't just a viewing mechanism. They are actually an action you take inside of Reminders. 

For instance if you want to assign a tag to a bunch of things, I'm going to select a bunch of items here that don't have the Project Alpha tag. If I were to go to Edit and then Tags I can assign Project Alpha that way. I can also simply drag here and assign Project Alpha to all of those. 

Here is another interesting thing you can do with Smart Lists. You can create a Smart List from a regular list. What do I mean by that. Well, let's go into Work Tasks. Here I've got two items in this Work Task regular List. Now, I've got no tags assigned to either of these. With this list selected I can do File and I can Convert to Smart List. As it says here what it is going to do is turn the name of that list into a tag. Assign that tag to both those items and replace the regular list with the Smart List that shows both those items. I'll Allow the conversion and you can see now this is the Smart List and both of those items have that tag applied to them. Where did these item go though? They have to be in a regular list somewhere. Well they went to the default list. The Default List is this Reminders List and you can see them now added to the bottom of the Default List. You can set the Default List in Reminders Settings and you can see it right here. 

Now we've already talked about what Reminders is, which is a place. It's a Search result. But, let's also talk about what Reminders is not. It is not a complex set of criteria. By that I mean you can't do too much with a Smart List. Let's go back to this one here and let's Edit it. You see I've added one item here. Now I can click the Plus Button here and say, oh in addition to that let's only have items that are high priority. Now it has to be All of these or it has to be Any of these. Either High Priority or having the Project Alpha tag assigned to it. So that seems pretty complex right there. But, like I said before, you can't have another priority item here. You can only use it once. You can't have another tag item here. You can only use it once. So you can't get as complex as you can with other Smart Items like Smart Folders. But wait a minute. This is where I tell you that if you hold the Option Key down these Plus Buttons change to three dots. If you click the three dots then you get this cool group here where you've got a main criteria and a sub criteria and you can change these. Except this doesn't work! This is some sort of buggy unfinished interface. Notice that this thing, even though indented, isn't actually any different than the rest of these. So keep your definition for your Smart List simple trying to get more complex is probably just going to lead you down to a dead end. 

Now for completeness I need to talk about another kind of a Smart List. There is these preset Smart Lists. You're actually looking at some of them right here. You've got Today, Things Due Today, you've got Things With A Schedule and it shows you nicely divided up. You've got a Smart List for All, everything from every list is going to be mixed in here under All. You've got anything you've set is Flagged. Anything you've set as Urgent, it has an alarm set to it. Also Completed Items is there as well. If you go to View, Show Smart Lists, you'll see these preset lists and you can set what is shown and what isn't. Also you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on any of these and Hide so you don't have to keep going to the menu there. You can get rid of Urgent and get rid of Completed, like that. In addition if you want to add your own to the top here you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on one of these and Pin to the Top. You'll see that it appears here with the predefined Smart List. You can even drag it and put higher up. So there's your look at using Smart Lists in the Reminders App. Hope you found this is helpful. Thanks for watching.