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Apple should merge Reminders and Calendar

Silly John Fatty

Silly John Fatty

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Nov 6, 2012
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To those of you who use both: Do you also ever feel like some things you have to do could fit both in reminders and your calendar?

Sometimes I don’t know where to add them …

I feel like Apple should merge both apps in some way. Or allow integration.

I feel like I have two apps that partially do the same thing or have the same use.

Does anyone else feel like that, and how do you handle it?
 
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I feel very similarly about Notes and Reminders, in fact using Notes as todo lists/task management far more than setting up similar tasks and such in Reminders.

IMO: Reminders is odd man out here. Fold it into Calendar or Notes. However, me feeling like that doesn't mean everyone does and there is likely people who think Reminders is perhaps the greatest thing Apple has ever made and notes or note + cal features are not even close. So for them, keep it.

I just helped someone this week wanting to get more organized and showed them how to do Reminder-type stuff in Notes + Calendar. I talked about Reminders as an alternative but they favored Notes + Cal.
 
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as it always was in the old days when we all used Now Contacts and Now Up to Date, and even when Palm Desktop was both a conduit to Palm and also a great calendar app.

i do find myself wanting to set an alarm for somethng and wasting 5 mins trying ti decide whether im putting it into reminders or calendar.
 
Been thinking about that myself.
Here's a few of my personal ideas on the matter, somewhat an attempt to differentiate.
YMMV

  • Calendar = events
    • occur on a specific date and time
    • sometimes other people are being invited
    • automatic reminder to attend
  • Reminders = tasks
    • have a deadline
    • sometimes assigned to other people
    • automatic notification on due date
Apart from that, I do agree a degree of integration would be great indeed.
An example that immediately comes to mind is having your tasks automatically show up in your calendar on their due dates.
 
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Absolutely. Also, make it so that you auto-organize your tasks in the day (like Btleroy did), that you have a day-graph.view (kind of like Structured) and that you can have a countdown to events (1d2h20min to event X)…. And lots of small other improvents. So many other apps like TickTick, Structured, Sorted, Fantastical, Good task ALMOST get it right, but there still is no real smart integration of Calendar and TaskManagement. Plus, integrating AI à la Motion with TimeBlocking and auto-arranging tasks would be a game-changer.
 
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I like the concept of Reminders App, that it gives a fast overview of important dates inside a grouped structure. E.g. I use separate lists for warranties, contract or subscription renewals, wedding days or birthdays of persons that are not in my contacts. Those events are either periodically or far far away in time, but they are almost happening without myself being involved, however it's good to get reminded of them.

Calendars help me to get my daily routines planned while being able to see what others, those that share their Calendars with me, are doing. I use my business and private calendars for things that I need to do proactively and that need my personal attention. Fantastical makes it easy to either insert a Calendar event for something that has a mandatory start time or insert private or business Reminders for tasks that should be done by myself at some point of the day, but starting time doesn't really matter much.

I share my Calendars with others, but not my Reminders.

To be honest, I use Gantt charts and Kanban for certain projects and I tried tools like TaskCoach, Eisenpower, Pagico and Things, because sometimes I feel, like I could get things even better done with better tools. I'm sure there is much potential for all of us to optimize self-organization and for Apple how we can do it even better.
 
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GerritV said:
Been thinking about that myself.
Here's a few of my personal ideas on the matter, somewhat an attempt to differentiate.
YMMV

  • Calendar = events
    • occur on a specific date and time
    • sometimes other people are being invited
    • automatic reminder to attend
  • Reminders = tasks
    • have a deadline
    • sometimes assigned to other people
    • automatic notification on due date
Apart from that, I do agree a degree of integration would be great indeed.
An example that immediately comes to mind is having your tasks automatically show up in your calendar on their due dates.
Click to expand...


sometimes for me, a task will start as being done somepoint before a deadline, and then at some stage i will decide 'doing that on thursday from 10am til 11' and i want to see that time blocked off in my calendar. in the old old days of Now or Palm Desktop, it would mean dragging something from the reminders list over onto the calendar section which was really easy. thats not so easy on apple now.
 
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Silly John Fatty said:
To those of you who use both: Do you also ever feel like some things you have to do could fit both in reminders and your calendar?

Sometimes I don’t know where to add them …

I feel like Apple should merge both apps in some way. Or allow integration.

I feel like I have two apps that partially do the same thing or have the same use.

Does anyone else feel like that, and how do you handle it?
Click to expand...
BusyCal (which is generally excellent) does this. It read/writes your Calendars and Reminders and unifies them into one app. I don't really get much use out of it, myself, because I use Things more than Reminders. But yeah, those two things can be unified in one app.
 
On a technical level, Notes and Reminders sync via iCal and are technically calendar items, or at least did when they were introduced.

However, Reminders is (an actually increasingly decent) list and todo list app. I’ll use it for shopping lists (such as groceries) and other list that don’t have a date attached to them, particularly when my OmniFocus/GTD system isn’t up to snuff and I’m meaning to get back on the bandwagon (or when I want to be able to go through the list on my watch). And the ability to set a reminder on a calendar date is still useful even when I’m using OmniFocus, I’ll use Reminders as the notification (especially if it’s an email) even if I’m tracking it as part of an OmniFocus project; it works a little like a GTD tickler file. The recent addition of tags probably increases its capabilities as a todo list.

I almost never use Notes. I’ll use it on rare occasions when I need to copy text down and for whatever reason am not using Drafts. I do use Calendar fairly often for appointments, particularly for time to leave notifications. For more casual usage, though, especially not tied to a location, I tend to use a calendar book (much faster to write an appointment down).

In general, all three are different enough for me (and probably quite a few other users) that it makes sense to have a different UI/frontend for them. Now, consider Outlook, it actually does combine all three (and email and contacts on top of that). But I don’t use its task tracking features nearly as often as I should because of it.
 
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Apple's UI design for all their little apps (contacts, calendar, reminders, notes) is lame. Imagine how they'd bork a convergence effort. I put up with them because, if nothing else, I can sync with Wifey's activities in same. Outlook is too fiddly. Google is too creepy. I always thought Apple should buy out FantastiCal, and graft it on top of their sync engine.
 
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madeirabhoy said:
<snip> in the old old days of Now or Palm Desktop, it would mean dragging something from the reminders list over onto the calendar section which was really easy. thats not so easy on apple now.
Click to expand...

Actually dragging a reminder into your calendar is relatively easy, at least on a Mac.
 
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I still carry around a Palm TX PDA just for the Datebk6 app which, among other useful features, wonderfully combines a calendar with to-do items that float to the next day if not checked-off as done. Datebk6 lives on as Pimlical, but, sadly, only for Android mobile devices.
 
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I only use reminders for shopping lists. Anything with a due-date goes in my calendar.

I don't have any requirements for complex stuff such as allocating tasks to other people, or needing overdue notifications.
 
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I use Calender for appointments with others. Reminders is for things I don’t want to forget. My day is not so jammed that I have to block 30 minutes do a 5 or 10 minute task. Rather than combining them, I like how they are because it gives you options.
 
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I prefer looking at the structured lists of Reminders.

But I have the luxury of having the awesome Fantastical app, albeit grandfathered into the non-subscription model since I paid for it years ago, which effectively merges Calendar with Reminders - you may wish to have that app, @Silly John Fatty.

If they ever kick us off the non-subscription version, then I'll just go back to separate Calendar and Reminder apps.

Merging a couple of basic resources isn't something I would pay a subscription for.
 
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100%! Absolutely!

The reason why I still don't use Apple's stock calendar on the Mac is exactly that: no reminders integration/display.
It is so obvious. What does one do, when planning a day? Looking at appointments and todos. Having both in 2 different locations makes me nervous.
I use a 3rd party app instead - but miss some features of the stock app. I have no idea why Apple can't get this done.

Different story, same result: in iOS, I also use a 3rd party app instead of Apple's. Not only does it also lack reminders, but there is no reasonable week nor month display. I find the stock calendar on iOS totally insufficient for planning purposes, as it is not providing a decent overview of the appointments for the next days or weeks.

Many others can do that - and Apple can't???

P.S. I sent them MANY feature requests on both issues via their feedback system, over the last years (!) - of course no reaction and no app enhancements.
 
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GerritV said:
Perhaps this can be of help.

View attachment 2299586
Click to expand...
It took me a while to figure out what you did.

1. create an appointment in calendar
2. drag & drop appointment over to reminders
3. delete appointment in calendar (it will remain in reminders)
4. drag & drop appointment from reminders back to calendar

It will NOT work with a reminder that was 'regularly' created in the reminders app.
At least not in my environment with Sonoma 14.0.
 
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Jared G.K. said:
It took me a while to figure out what you did.

1. create an appointment in calendar
2. drag & drop appointment over to reminders
3. delete appointment in calendar (it will remain in reminders)
4. drag & drop appointment from reminders back to calendar

It will NOT work with a reminder that was 'regularly' created in the reminders app.
At least not in my environment with Sonoma 14.0.
Click to expand...
Sorry for having been unclear. What I did:
1. Create a task in Reminders
2. Drag-and-drop it into a timeslot of Calendar
All that in latest Sonoma.
 
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