My Apple Reminders Setup: iPad Productivity

every summer during the OS beta period I switch back to using Apple's built-in productivity apps notes calendars and reminders I do this because I want to have a good understanding of where they're at and you know what has changed in them in these new OS updates and most importantly how they compare two modern third-party Alternatives reminders has been particularly interesting to use this summer it didn't receive a huge amount of updates but the changes that it got are really important and really handy to use this video is sponsored by routines by hm Bradley I have a lot of mixed feelings about using the built-in reminders app on one hand it's definitely one of Apple's most powerful built-in applications but it does fall short in certain areas when setting up the reminders app you can create list and other task managers these would be called projects lists are a great way to group different tasks together based on common ground for example I have lists for bills grocery shopping Home Improvement projects admin tasks video projects sponsorships and more when creating a list you can add a name select a color and an icon for me I like to organize list Colors by Blue equaling personal and orange equaling work for icons I like to use emoji while the built-in icons are nice they are severely limited with Emoji you can use any Emoji you want once you build out a list you can drag and drop one of the lists on top of another to create a group I built two groups one for personal and one for work the reason I did this is so that I can hide the personal one when I'm working or when I'm not working and I'm trying to take a break from work and not see that kind of stuff I can hide the work stuff this really helps me stay focused on what I should be doing at a given time if you have a particular list you like to reference a lot you can pin it at the top you can do this by long pressing on the list and selecting pin this will move it to the top part of the reminders column I created a list called inbox and pinned it to the top I use this to quickly dump ideas and tasks that are just in my head think you know those things that just pop into your head and you need to write them down or you will absolutely forget about them that's what I use the inbox for I have a shortcut that lives in my dock called task cut this prompts me for whatever task that pops into my head and I can just add it right there into the inbox but where this gets interesting is if I have Safari open it will detect that Safari page and automatically take the URL from whatever page I have open and add it to that task I use this all the time for articles I want to read or things I should buy or stuff I need to check out and just put it right into a task I'll put a link to this shortcut and everything else that I mentioned in the description below you can also edit what is in this pinned section by selecting the more menu and hitting edit list here you can disable and enable the built-in smart lists speaking of smart lists you can build your own in the add list or edit menu select the list type and pick smart filter then select edit filters here you can choose from different criteria to make your smart list when building out a smart list you can choose from such filters as tags date time location flag priority and list one filter I have that looks for all of my tasks that don't have a due date this is my someday view this gathers up all those tasks that don't have a particular due date and they're just something I would like to do someday hence the name if you're somebody that lives out of a task manager and it has just a bunch of stuff to it this is an important view to have because a lot of times what I have found is tasks can just get buried in a task manager and tasks that you intended to do you know for whatever reason you just didn't get to them and this keeps those from getting buried and sometimes you just add tasks and months later you're like I don't need to do this and you can just delete them now one important note about smartlist is you can't add multiple filters of the same type or even multiple parameters in the same filter meaning you can't have multiple dates or lists in a filter this is extremely limiting and a big reason why I don't use this feature more you can however choose to include tasks that match any or all of the filters that you are including this video is sponsored by routines by hm Bradley the best way to describe routines is its shortcuts but for your finances and it's extremely cool routines uses blocked based automations just like shortcuts zapier or even IFTTT first you start off with a trigger for your automation this could be stuff like a direct deposit happens or when your balance is over a certain amount you then set up the action for example if I get paid by my employer I could have it automatically move a hundred dollars to my vacation fund here are a few basic automations I've been using to automate my finances so the way this works is these run when I get a new direct deposit to my account I have it set up that so that 10 of that deposit goes into an emergency fund 20 goes to a tax plan and then five percent goes to a vacation plan this way the money automatically gets put aside into these savings accounts and I don't have to worry about a thing currently with my finances I have savings accounts set up for these different categories but I have to manually go in and move the money and do the math which means that doesn't happen very often with routines these automations happen in the background and I don't have to worry about them routines even has support for sending notifications via email and SMS and with the new iOS 17 automation trigger is able to happen automatically in the background you can set up shortcuts to run when these notifications come in this is something I'm going to be playing around with a lot right now I have a shortcut automation setup that it looks for the email address from routines then when it sees it it sends me a push notification that I've been paid and then opens up my reminders list to pay bills if you're looking to automate your personal finances routines by hm Bradley is the place to go like this is really cool I'm going to put a link to it in the description below so you can go check it out I highly encourage you to do so my thanks to hm Bradley for sponsoring this video the most used built-in smart list by me at least is the today view this is what I'm looking at when I'm working on my iPad this is also what the view of my main reminders widget is set to as well in this view you can enable Group by time this will take all of the tasks that are due today and that have time reminders on them and group them in either by the morning afternoon or tonight view if you're somebody that's used to getting your day split up into these sections this can be really helpful but these views are extremely limiting there's no customizing them there's no adding anything more to them they are what they are typically for me I don't use time-based reminders I just use the dates so this section isn't really that helpful to me in reminders you can turn lists into templates build out your list and add your task once you have that select the more button in the list section and choose save as template now when you create a list you can go into the templates Tab and recall that template I have used this in the past for video projects and sponsorship stuff it works fantastic and it saved me so much much time it works great for any project that you're just repeating the same task over and over again so look at your workflow and see what you could use a template for you can also share lists with other people this way you can take a project and collaborate with others on it this isn't something I do because I'm a one-man shop I pretty much work by myself with a couple of asterisks on that but it'd be really great if I had a team of people or something work with me I would absolutely use this what I could also see this being used for is just sharing it with your partner on household projects grocery lists you know things you just want to do movie wants to watch shows to watch things like that in the shared list you could actually go in and assign specific tasks to specific people the list is shared with if you're using a keyboard with an iPad or a Mac you can hit command and then a number to jump through your list so it starts with one and this will jump to the list that is in the top left corner two will go one over three four five and moves in that sequential view grocery list and iOS and iPad OS 17 got a really interesting update now if you have a grocery list in reminders you can long press on it and select the show list info option and then change the list type to grocery when adding items to this reminders list it will auto sort them into the right category this way when you're shopping and you're getting like Dairy items you'll get all of your dairy stuff in one section in reminder so you can grab all that when you're in the dairy aisle or when you're in the meat aisle or produce aisle or whatever this is a genius feature and I absolutely love it it's been awesome to use over the summer another feature that was added in iOS and iPad OS 17 is to change the way a view is handled inside of a list by default you can now add sections this is a way to organize your tasks into a list I do do this in my admin list this way I can break up all of my stuff into different groups I have a lot of miscellaneous kind of work in there that that spans across different categories so this way I can organize stuff into General business YouTube videos or other projects but if you go into the more menu you can select view as column and you'll get a kanban view right in reminders in here you can add as many columns as you like the idea behind this is that each task you do has a state of being and then each task or project that is in this list can move to the state that it is in this is where you can quickly visually see where all of your tasks and projects are I use this for videos sponsors and even home improvement tasks this is hands down my favorite feature that has been added to reminders in a long time it has allowed me to quickly get a visual look at to where I am with a video project or sponsorship and in the fall when everything's being announced and released and I just have a bunch of different videos I'm working on at a given time this is really handy if you're working on a big project that has multiple steps and different states that tasks and projects can be in give this a try especially if you're a visual person like me now a quick tip if you are planning to use the list or the section view a lot you can go into reminders and edit the toolbar here you can add a button for quickly adding a new section in these views when creating a test there's an impressive amount of data triggers that can be added in a reminder there's the normal features you would expect to see in a task manager like date and time triggers there's even keyboard shortcuts for quickly assigning due dates command T will make a task to you today command shift T will make a task to tomorrow and command K will make a task to this coming weekend there's also a notes section for the task I use this a lot to write out an idea behind a project or add a link to purchase something one of the most interesting aspects of reminders though is the fact that you can add both location and message triggers this means you can set up a task to remind you when you arrive or leave a specific place this could be your home office whatever there is also an option for reminding you when you are either getting in or out of your car I love this and use them all the time as just a reminder to be like hey next time I'm out go run this errand the other trigger is getting a reminder about a task when you start to message somebody this works by sending you a notification when you start to talk to somebody it's great for when you're talking to somebody about something completely different but then you get a notification about like oh that's right I needed to talk to them about this other thing reminders also has support for subtasks as well to add them you have to go into the inspector page for that given task then go to subtask you can however pull up the inspector quickly when a task is Select by hitting command I once a subtask is entered you can use the arrow to hide them but what's weird and I really dislike this and it took me forever to figure out what's going on here when you're in a smart list like the today page subtasks are hidden you have to go into the inspector page for the given parent task to see all of the subtasks unless you also assign a due date for the sub task but if you do this the subtask will then just look like a regular task in the today view the way I see this is if the parent task is due today the subtask should also be due today the way reminders handle subtask is the weirdest feature about it okay moving on from the weirdness of subtask there is something that's really cool with tasks and reminders and that is you can add images to them there really isn't anything I particularly use this for but I could see this being used for other people especially people that work in maybe like graphic design and stuff like that as like hey this is a flyer I need to update or this is the thing I need to work on I think that's just a really cool feature that other people could use in the menu though for attaching these you can actually scan a document like you would in notes or files but what's weird is you can't add a pre-existing document and this is a huge bummer because this is what I would use this for I often get a lot of PDFs that I would like to attach to a sponsorship or to a video project or something like that and there's no way to do that in reminders when creating task reminders should recommend metadata for the task for example while typing washcard tomorrow it should suggest the due date as tomorrow you can even type A Time as well then you would tap on this info and add it but it doesn't always do it reminders should also make suggestions as to what list something should be added to if it's not already in a particular list that you're adding it to this can be extremely handy when it works and this is Apple's own way of adding natural language support to reminders one of my favorite features of iPad OS is the ability to drag and drop content it's not novel at all but it's really useful in this case you can drag and drop stuff into reminders to create tasks I do this a lot from mail I bring a message over two reminders and it will actually link back to the mail message this is great for important emails I can't deal with in the moments contracts stuff I need to go over Etc this is just another feature that I really wish supported PDF documents and other file types in iOS and iPad OS 17 a huge feature of that is interactive widgets and reminders really benefits from that you can now Mark tasks as completed right from your home screen no more needing to jump into the app to do this so nice on my home screen I have two widgets one has all my tasks due for today and then the other one has all my tasks do for the week you can also use the reminders widget on the lock screen as well and these are interactive as well and I have this display playing all the tasks that are due today interactive widgets are one of my favorite features in iOS and iPad OS 17. with reminders you can have shortcuts pull all of your tasks just as easily as you can add one so I have a shortcut here that pulls all of my tasks that I do in a given week this sorts them in the order that they're due I can then select a task and jump right to that list if I so choose this is Handy for reviewing a given week and seeing what's upcoming in the find reminders action you can use this to filter out certain lists or you know stuff Beyond a certain date if you just want this to be focused on your work list you can do that as well also I recently updated my bag checklist shortcut to support reminders this now asks for the name of your trip when you are leaving and when you are returning it does some math to make sure you pack the appropriate amount of clothing it uses a dictionary action to let you pick from the different categories you are going to pack for you can edit this to be whatever category or Whatever item you want to be in that dictionary As You Wish not everyone is going to pack the same stuff ipac in fact I would venture to guess nobody packs the same stuff I pack I also updated my heavily used check laundry shortcut to support reminders as well and I'll link to all of those in the description below there are some things I would love to see reminders get next the the biggest thing that is holding me back from going all in on reminders is creating a start date for a task and also having a due date this is something I did a lot in things where I would set a a task to start on a certain day and then also have a separate due date because there are things that I do that are just going to take multiple days so I give me a range of a few days to work on them what I would also love to see reminders get is some sort of calendar integration so you have all these tasks that are due on a certain day why not lay them out on a calendar or support you know the iOS calendar app and let you sync all that stuff over reminders needs to get faster at creating tasks it's very clunky the inspector page is clunky it just it needs to get faster whether it just supports natural language for all of the input options or what it just needs to get faster for inputting tasks and then finally I would love to see a way to link different tasks together kind of like how notes got the ability to link notes together I would love to be able to either link tasks together or take that a step further and let me link a note from the notes app to a task in reminders and vice versa but all that being said reminders has come a really long way and there's a lot to like about it part of me wants to keep using it even after my summer beta OS trial period I'm kind of waiting to see what third-party apps do I'm on a couple of betas and there's some interesting stuff happening that I'll talk more about in the future my thanks to routines by hm Bradley for sponsoring this video if you liked the video hit the Thumbs Up Button subscribe if you haven't already thank you all so much for watching and have a great day

Channel: Christopher Lawley

Views: 363,202

Keywords: Apple, iPad, iPad Pro, iPad Pro 12.9, iPhone, iPad Productivity, Getting things done on iPad, Working off iPad, iPadOS, iOS, App, Shortcuts, Automation, Reminders, Walkthrough, Guide, How To, How-To, Task Manager, Things, Things 3, What's New, Productivity, Apps, Free, GTD, Getting Things Done, Task, To do, To-Do, workflow, Reminder, To Do Manager, Reminders Workflow, Reminders Guide, Reminders App, Apple Reminders App, iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS, Sanoma, Task Management, How to use a task manager

Id: jOii0srEFT0

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2023