You Can Finally Use Reminders in Apple Calendar
Apple’s Calendar and Reminders apps are so closely linked that it’s surprising the company has never tried to bridge the gap. On any given day, you can schedule appointments and events in the Calendar app, and the actual tasks you need to complete for those events are in the Reminders app.
But after upgrading to iOS 18 and updates to macOS Sequoia (which you can currently try out in the developer beta ), you’ll no longer need to switch between the two apps—your reminders will automatically appear in the Calendar app. Here’s how it works.
How to view reminders in the Calendar app
Apple’s implementation of this feature is quite simple. Any reminder or event you create in the Reminders app that has a due date and time automatically appears in the Calendar app. You don’t need to do anything else, and the feature is even enabled by default if you’re running iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. This works for all your reminders—the Calendar app will even display the corresponding color of your list in the checkbox icon.
The integration is done well: the reminder appears with a checkbox so you can complete it from within the Calendar app itself! You can see your reminders in the Day view and even in the new Month view if you use the new zoom feature to zoom in on a specific week.
Once a reminder appears in Calendar, you can move it to change the time (just like you can with an event), and the change will be reflected instantly in the Reminders app.
Conversely, you can also create a reminder from the Calendar app, although the interface is a bit clunky. Click the Plus button at the top and switch to the Reminder tab to create a reminder instead of an event. Here you can give it a name, set the date and time, and add it to your general reminder list.
Third party tools are still available.
There are already some interesting third-party options that can help integrate reminders with the Calendar app, but they can’t integrate a checkbox for reminders into the Calendar app like Apple does. However, they do offer customization options.
The ReminderCal app allows you to automatically send reminders to your Calendar, but the reminders appear as events rather than tasks. However, the app gives you more control over which reminders appear in Calendar (something Apple doesn’t offer yet). On the other hand, since it is a third-party app, it suffers from synchronization and connection issues that are not an issue with the Apple feature.
Another completely different option is to use a day planner app like Structured, which can combine tasks and calendar events into one app, helping you mark off events and their associated tasks in one pane. This is something Apple still hasn’t done since, despite finally working together in iOS 18, the Reminders and Calendar apps remain separate apps. If you want to create and manage reminders and subtasks directly from the Calendar app, the Structured app is still your best choice.