Apple's Reminders app is already a productivity powerhouse filled with features and tools that make it easy to stay on top of all of the projects in your life. But get ready to kick it up a notch because the seven pro tips I'm about to reveal are game changers. I'm Dylan Stewart, the Mac Whisperer, and in today's lesson, I'm going to teach you seven pro tips that are going to take your reminders game up to the next level and help you get more done with less effort.
But don't leave before you hear my... Macwhisperer Pro Power Tip because this one is so powerful and will save you so much time that I really don't know what you're going to do with all your free time. Let's hop on in and get started. Our first tip is all about organization.
One of the challenges with reminders and tasks and projects is they can really get overwhelming and you can end up with an almost infinite number of lists for this project and that project and this task and that task. And if you've watched any of my prior videos about how to use reminders, you might even have reminders lists for movies or books to read or things to do with your family, all sorts of projects that just seem overwhelming all of a sudden. But Apple has given us two very powerful reminders. powerful tools to organize our reminders list. The first one is your pin list that you see in the upper left hand corner here.
There are certain pre selected lists like the all list, the flags list, the today list, the scheduled list and the completed list that are automatically there, but you can also add your own lists in, which is really helpful when you've got lists that you're in all the time and you want easy, quick access to them without having to scroll up and down. By right clicking on any one of these that that you don't want, you can hide the list. Like I don't need this all list, that's not helpful to me. And I also don't need this completed list.
So I'm gonna right click and hide the completed list. If you have one of your lists that you don't really need in the pin section, you can right click it and you can unpin that list. And if there's something that's important that you wanna get to, you can right click on it and pin it and it'll come up to the top where you can then reorganize it any way you want to, to make sure that the things that are most important to you are front and center. The second part of this tip has to do with collections.
If you look at your list, you're going to realize that some of these lists actually go together. For example, my honey do list, my date night list, my handyman list, the fun ideas list, and the couple powers list are all related to family. So let me put them all together like this. I'm going to select the first one and I'm going to hold the shift button down and I'm going to select all of them but the last one and here's why. When you select all of them and you leave the last one open, you can drag them all into the last one, which compiles it into a group or a collection that you can just give a name to.
And then you can easily click this little arrow to hide that collection until you're looking for family related things. And if you create additional lists or find a list that really should go into one of those groups or collections, all you have to do is just drag it down and drop it in and it will join the other lists and you can then close that drawer. drawer and have an even cleaner reminders experience. Our second tip is subtasks.
When you're working on a project, sometimes one task has subtasks that go underneath it. And rather than trying to reorganize them manually, you can easily create subtasks directly from the reminders list. So if we come into my honey-do list here, you're going to see I got to buy extension cords, I got to buy a drill, and I got to buy cafe lights.
But all of those... specific tasks should be subtasks of the go to the hardware store section. It's easy to create a subtask and there's a couple of different ways to do it. The first way is to drag a task and drop it onto the main task.
Now, when you go to click on these tasks, especially on your computer, don't click where the words are because it will think you want to edit it and it will open them up. Click to the right of where the words are or the left of where the circle is to easily grab and drag things. In this case, I'm going to grab the box.
by extension cord task and drop it directly into the GoToHardware store. Notice that it indented the extension cords to the right, letting me know that that's now a subtask of hardware store. But you can also add something by either right-clicking and choosing indent reminder or swiping from the left to the right and indenting it that way.
That automatically adds that subtask into the existing task. And don't forget, you can... close that off whenever you need to and it'll show you right here how many tasks are in there.
And if you create or find additional tasks, you can just drag them right in and they will be added the other subtasks that are there. Our third tip is repeating reminders. Sometimes you have reminders that don't just happen once and then are done.
They reoccur, like maybe your bills list, or maybe that medication you've got to take for that recent injury. When you're dealing with this kind of a repeating reminder, a lot of people make the mistake of putting it into their calendar, which can take an already busy calendar and turn it into chaos with all of your repeating medications. reminders and bills reminders scattered all over the place. There's a better way to do it directly through the reminders app.
Come into each of these reminders and put them on a schedule. Do it by double clicking on any reminder which opens up your get info window on the right side here. From here set a date.
In the case of my electricity bill that comes out on the 18th of every month. Now once I've set the initial date I can come down to this section and turn it on to repeating and there's a lot of options from repeat every day. to weekdays or weekends, repeat weekly or biweekly or monthly or every three months or every six months or yearly or custom. And the custom section gives you great control over how often you want to do it because maybe it's every week on Monday or maybe it's every month on the first Wednesday.
Whatever your repeating schedule is, that custom section is pretty helpful to figure it out. In some cases... I have bills that are every other month. So this way I'm going to come up to monthly, but instead of every month, it's going to be every two months.
And that'll set it up easily like that. Tip number four is columns. Columns are a great way to organize your reminders list so that things aren't all piled on top of each other. As you can see in my to watch list, I've added all the movies I want to watch with my family and I've sorted them based on what's playing on Netflix versus Apple TV or Mac.
or prime i have two examples to talk about to show you how to create columns and why they're important we'll start with my packing list my packing list is something i use every time i take a trip allowing me to easily add whatever items i want to bring on that trip and not forget anything but unfortunately not all trips are to hawaii some trips are up to the snow in the mountains you may need different things for different trips i don't want four five six different packing packing lists because it's going to make it complicated when I start packing. Which list am I going to need? Is it this one or that one? Which is where creating columns makes a ton of sense. Come to the View menu here and select View as Columns.
When you do that, everything that's in that list is going to be put into what's called the Others column, which is essentially the unsorted column. Now, what you can do is come over to your columns list on the top right corner and click it to create a brand new column. And now you can take the specific things and put them into the proper category so that you know you've got the right pieces for the right packing list.
And sometimes you may need to copy and paste something so that you have it in both lists. Now as you complete the warm weather list, you've got the cold weather list for your next trip up to Colorado or the Alps, making it easy to pack for different trips without having to create separate lists. And one of the other examples I've got for for the importance of columns is my date night list.
I'm regularly gathering ideas for what my wife and I can do for our weekly date nights. Some of them are events, while some of them are activities, and some of them are dinner related. So let's create a couple of new columns. First off, click View and View as Columns.
From here, click the New Column button right there, and we're gonna create, and then I'll create another column here for, and then another column here for, and let's even make another one for GIF. Now, I can take any objects and drag them into the appropriate place so I know when something is an event or when something is an activity for us to do at home, when something is a great place to go have dinner or spend a weekend. It makes it easier for me to organize the separate pieces rather than just having one list with everything on it. Simple and easy. Tip number five is sharing and collaborating with reminders.
Having a reminder list is great and it helps you stay on track of projects and tasks, but sometimes you're not the only person that needs to be working on that particular list. For example, when I have my movies list, I've shared that with both my wife and my son so they can add movies onto it. And what good is a honey-do list when your wife and husband aren't connected on the same list?
It's very easy to share a list. You can either do it by clicking on the little person icon on the left side here. here like this, which brings up a little bit of a problem. list of different ways to collaborate.
You can come into messages or into email to invite them to it. You can also do that from inside of a list by clicking on the share button in the upper right hand corner here. And when that person joins the list, you'll see them under the manage people section here so you can keep track of it.
There are a lot of great reasons to share lists. My honeydew list and my movies list are great examples of that. But I'm also in the middle of a very complicated work project.
I call it my MacWhisperer project here. Let's go ahead and click on that. If I click on the share section here and go to manage the shared list, you're going to see that my assistant, Alila, and my two right-hand men, Ben and Frank, are all on this list. I can click the plus button to share this list with other people.
The people that you share with have to be on Apple products, and Columns only works on macOS Sonoma or iPad or iOS 17 or later. The real power of a shared list. list is being able to assign specific tasks to specific people. So, here I'm going to right click and assign that to Ben. And over here, I'm going to right click on it and I'm going to assign that to Elila.
When you assign something to someone, in the lower right-hand corner, you'll see their picture or their initials to let you know who's assigned to a particular task. Tip number six is hashtags. That's right.
Apple Reminders now supports hashtags. But before Before we jump into how to use them, let's explain hashtags a little bit. A lot of people have misunderstood hashtags and they put them at the bottom of all of their Instagram and Facebook and blog posts as if they were emojis, as if putting a hashtag and writing anything makes sense. So you'll see hashtags that are like, hashtag, this is the greatest blog post I've ever written. That's not a hashtag.
The purpose for hashtags was for searchability, for easily finding things. If all of your Instagram posts that have to do with sunsets have hashtag sunset, someone searching for sunsets that doesn't even know you can find your pictures and other people's. Hashtags should be simple and there shouldn't be a billion of them. When it comes to hashtags and reminders, it's even more important to keep it clear and concise.
Hashtags are an easy way to find things that might otherwise be scattered across multiple lists. If you scroll to the bottom of your lists on the left, you'll see your hashtags. If you don't have any there, you may not have created any yet, which we'll talk about in just a moment.
But from here, if I want to see every one of my reminders that has me on it as a tag, I can click on the Dylan tag and they'll automatically show up. But you can combine hashtags into each other. So if I want to find everything that has Dylan and Burning Man on it, I can click here and it creates that list.
If I want everything that has Dylan and Burning Man and to purchase on it. That's that list. So by using hashtags, you can easily sort and find things without making your life super complicated.
So let's learn how to create a hashtag. I'm going to hop into my to purchase list up in my pinned favorites here. And from here, you can see I've got all these columns and all of these things that I want to buy for various purposes.
As we see over here, this MagSafeFinder wallet and stand doesn't have a hashtag on it, so I'm going to add one. As I right click. on it.
In the bottom here, you're going to see tags and the option to add a tag or assign one of my existing tags. You can actually select a whole section of a reminders list and tag all of them at the same time if you like. In this case, I only want to add a tag to this one. But in addition to being able to right click on it, if you click the little I, you'll see a section right here that says add tags.
And you'll see that it's giving me suggestions. So, if I... I come in and I go hashtag to, it's going to give me my to purchase or to do list.
In fact, you don't even need to put in the hashtag. If you just write the letters TO, it's going to find those. But maybe this is a new tag that I haven't ever utilized before.
I just type in MagSafe and hit return and it creates that hashtag for me and adds it to my tag list alphabetically down at the bottom right here. There it is, MagSafe. If you decide that you don't need a tag or you went a little tag crazy to begin with and you want to clean things up just right-click on any tag and you can delete it right from here and that will remove it from any reminders that it's set up on tip number seven is creating a smart list we've all heard about these smart things in photos they call them smart albums and mail it smart folders or smart mailboxes or all of these different smart functions well reminders got them to now they're called a smart list the purpose of a smart list is to take half hashtags and use them to Create the list itself so that when you add a hashtag, it automatically comes over into the smart list.
In this case, I want to create a smart list for my hashtag Dylan and my hashtag to purchase, so I have one easy place for all the things that I want to buy. for me. Once you've selected the hashtags in the tag section, right-click and create a smart list which will contain everything that meets those two criteria. Meaning that if I'm in my to purchase list and I find something that it isn't in there and should be, I can tag it with the two tags that it needs in order to move in that smart list, which in this case is Dylan and to purchase right here.
As soon as I do that, that automatically ends up in my Dylan and to purchase list along with all of the other stuff that I've automatically added into it. It makes it easy to organize your list based on your hashtags without having to create a manual list and drag things into it. That way, whenever I'm creating a new reminder, And I simply add the right hashtags in it goes into that smart list without my having to do it manually In just a moment I'm gonna deliver my Mac whisperer power tip But before I do if you've learned something cool or learn something new go ahead and give this video a thumbs up so that it Can be easy for other people to find it and if you've got a question a comment a suggestion Anything you want to tell me drop it down in the comments section I love hearing from you guys and I always respond to every comment you And if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, why not?
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And with that being said, let's jump into a MacWhisperer power tip. Our MacWhisperer power tip is called templates. And templates is an amazing part of reminders that most people don't know even exists.
Here's the scenario. In some cases, you may have a list. that you complete but then need to recreate. It could be your packing list. And maybe you don't want to uncheck all of the buttons and recheck them every time you take a trip.
It's easy to create a template by coming up to the file menu here. and choosing save as template. When you do that, it'll ask for a name and it'll confirm it and add it into the templates list.
What that means is whenever you're done with that trip, you can right click and you can delete your packing list without worrying about it. Why? Because you've already got a packing list template and all you have to do is come into the file menu, go into view templates and click on it to recreate it just like that. It comes back in with all of your columns, all of your settings, all of the things that you... you've previously done on it.
Now for me, I've got a very specific use for this template suggestion. In case you think it's easy to make these YouTube videos, it's not. There's a whole process. It starts with brainstorming the ideas.
I create bullet points, and as I create the bullet points, I add them right in here so that I can easily rehearse the script. Then I film the video. Notice the subtasks inside the filmed video so that I can close it off and keep it simple. I upload it and take it to the editor.
And then I create a description along with timestamps. I update all of the tags on the video. I update the titles and the thumbnail. And it's all of these steps.
And as I go through the process of making a video, I click them off. Each step, each step along the way. I click all of them off and tell the happy day when I'm completed with this entire YouTube video.
And I can say, farewell, YouTube video. Go off and let people watch you. And I...
and I'm so happy to get it off my screen. But then it's time for the next YouTube video and I have to do it all over again. I don't want to recreate that reminders list time and time again, and I don't have to.
In addition to going to the file menu to do it, you can also click add list. And from the add list section, you're going to see your templates right there. Let's find my template for my YouTube workflow, create it, and I'm back in business, ready to start making the next YouTube.
So that's what I've got for today's lesson about how to up-level your reminders use and take advantage of these seven pro tips. I'm Dylan Stewart, the Mac Whisperer. It's my passion and profession to help you get more done with your Apple products than you ever thought possible. And I'll see you next time.