The state of the Mac OS X todo manager market is something I am currently researching for one of my next posts. My hypothesis is that it is not in the best shape. However, as a part of this research I looked a bit closer to Apple’s stock todo manager, Reminders.app, and found some surprises, positive and negative ones.

Just to answer the obvious question upfront: No, I am not intending to switch from OmniFocus. Neither to Reminders.app nor to any other of the current todo apps.

Area Rug Tips

REMINDERS.APP & CONSISTENCY

Obviously Reminders.app on Mac OS X is one step behind it’s iOSversion when it comes to the UI design. While Mavericks’ calendar comes with more iOS 7 flavour than expected, Reminders.app still features the difficult to describe black frame and the skeuomorphic shopping paper.

Its functionality comes across as somewhat inconsistent:

  • You can drop emails from Mail.app into a list to create a task including a link back to the original email message
  • But cannot drop multiple emails on a list, although this should just produce the same result by count of emails dropped
  • While Reminders allows you to define a default list, it will not accept an email being dropped on its dock icon even though you would expect that would simple create above result in the default list
  • You can drop emails into lists, but not files. The only place you can “drop” a file is the note section of a task, but instead of a clickable link (or even attachment) you get the path to the file (non-clickable)
  • If you drop a URL from Safari or paste one from your clipboard you get a clickable link (nice way to link to a note or document in Evernote)
  • When you hide the list sidebar (⌘⌥S) you can swipe through your lists, but there is no keyboard navigation to do that
  • At first sight it looks like you cannot have repeating tasks in Reminders, but once you check the ‘remind me’ box, the repeat functionality becomes available in the task info

A FEW TRICKS & USEFUL SCRIPTS

  • You can select multiple lists from the sidebar with ⇧-click or ⌘-click to display all of the tasks on them together (grouped by list)
  • While there is no tagging in Reminders.app you can use old school text tags (e.g. #) in your tasks like an animal and leverage Reminders built-in search to filter matching tasks form all your lists. You can use this for names (#Dave) to have all related tasks at hand when you talk to Dave or keywords like #Waiting
  • Lex Friedmann covers the ability to use some level of natural language parsing with Reminders when adding task in his Macworld article that includes a screencast as well
  • Reminders.app has a rather rudimentary, but sufficient AppleScript API and the tutorial at MacStories gives a nice introduction to it
  • If you want to use Alfred to view and add tasks there is pretty powerful workflow by Jack james on the Alfred Forum
  • If you want to add all emails currently flagged in Mail.app as tasks to Reminders there is an AppleScript that helps you with that
  • A Tutsplus tutorial shows you how to automatically send a weekly summary email about your Reminders tasks
  • If you use geek tool to display stuff on your desktop this script helps you add today’s Reminders tasks to it
  • Like to remember what you achieved? Build an Automator Service to add completed Reminders tasks to your Day One journal
  • As a Gmail user you can use Chrome and this script to create Reminders tasks from your Gmail emails

Finally, if you want to do simple GTD® with Reminders you can follow my tutorial which actually is consistently amongst the top 10 posts of my blog.

Reminders.app on OS X is somewhat limited and inconsistent, but for its simplicity offers a lot of possibilities. For many this is all they need to keep control of their tasks and reminders.

Update 15/11/2013: A few more tips added around repeating tasks and natural language capabilities of Reminders