Use This App to Sync Apple Reminders With IPhone Calendar
Apple’s Reminders app is great, but I’ve always wanted to add it to my iPhone’s Calendar app as well. I’m most productive when I have a to-do list with clear due dates, but I find it difficult to review that list at the beginning of the day. I used to be afraid of adding too many entries to Reminders until I discovered ReminderCal ($5). This app does one thing and does it well – sync reminders with the Calendar app.
Why I like to see my tasks in Calendar
The Calendar app has a neat week view with some space added between each entry. If I have a run at 5 a.m., meditation at 7 a.m., and work at 9:30 a.m., those Reminders entries seem huge. The calendar displays the same three entries vertically with long gaps between them, which tells me that I have a lot of free time between my tasks. It’s almost like a trick that reduces the urgency of tasks and makes my brain think, “I can do this!”
How to sync reminders with your calendar
Once you download and install ReminderCal on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac (one purchase unlocks the app on all three platforms), you’ll need to give it access to your calendars and Reminders app. From here, the application will get the job done with minimal effort.
Now, when you add timed reminders in Apple’s Reminders app, they start appearing automatically in your calendar. If there are reminders that you don’t want to sync, you can start those entries with $nocal or $nocalendar and ReminderCal will ignore them.
On a Mac, if you allow ReminderCal to run in the background, it will automatically sync all your tasks. You don’t have to constantly open it and press the sync button.
On iPhone and iPad, background syncing is less reliable due to battery-saving measures in the operating system. That’s why I suggest using Apple’s Shortcuts app to set up an automation to force synchronization at a fixed interval. Simply open the Shortcuts app, tap the “+” in the top right corner, select the time of day to activate the shortcut, specify that the shortcut will be activated daily, and select the ReminderCal option. If you want ReminderCal to run multiple times a day, you’ll have to set up a few different automations to have it run every few hours.
Personally, I prefer to plan my day in advance, so I set ReminderCal to automatically sync at dawn. When I add tasks for the same day, I can always open ReminderCal on my iPhone and sync it manually. Entries appear in the calendar within a second.
Customizing ReminderCal to your liking
I love the simplicity of ReminderCal, and this also shows in the settings menu. The default settings work for almost everyone, but you can change some things if you want. The app allows you to choose whether you want recurring reminders to appear in your calendars, for example. It is enabled by default, but you can disable it if you wish. You can also force the app to sync completed reminders that were due in the past, but this is disabled by default to avoid cluttering your calendar.
I suggest two settings. I changed the default event duration from 30 minutes to one hour. The second setting allows you to invert the $nocal exception phrase. If you enable this feature, ReminderCal will only sync reminder entries that have the phrase $nocal in the body. This is a good option for those who want to sync reminders to their calendar very selectively.
Limitation you should be aware of
Unfortunately, third-party apps often have to deal with limitations. ReminderCal cannot sync your reminders to calendars other than Outlook and iCloud. This will be a deal breaker for many people, especially those who rely on Google Calendar, but there’s nothing the app developer can do about it yet.