if you want to use Apple's Reminders app to organize your to-do's how should you set it up here's what I would do now we're over here on the Mac but this works on iPhone and iPad as well so here I've got reminders and here I have a little note with the steps that I want to show you all so I don't forget anything now the very first thing that I want to do is split out actionable to-do's from non-actionable lists or Collections and let me show you what I mean by that let's say I have
a list of books to read and a shopping list and another shopping list those are not really to Do's that I might want to consider when I sit down in the morning and think Hmm what am I going to do today so let's split those out from the actual to do's and the way to do that is we're going to create or we're going to grab one list and actually drag it on top of another that creates a group and I'll just call these I'll just call this lists and then I'll drag shared grocery list
under there as well so now we've got these over here and they're just away from all the other stuff here I have a list called reminders and that's the next thing that I want to work on this is the default list and I'm going to rename it to inbox so that if we add something to the reminders app and we don't have time to organize it by default it ends up in a list called our inbox which is you know how we normally think of inboxes next up we are going to create a list for
each area of our life and we're going to do that by clicking add list and we'll start with admin and finances and we will also create maybe health home I like to have one called fun in trips and we'll do relationships and we'll do one called work now you might find that you want a slightly different organization which is fine but this is a good place to start I'm going to drag fun and trips on to admin finances to create a new group and I'm going to call this group to Do's I'll just drag that
above list because we're going to spend more time in there and then I'll drag the other lists underneath that group there we go so these are the big areas the big domains of your life work tasks go in here now projects become tasks with subtasks so a project is a group of to-do's that together contribute to a joint outcome for example me producing this video I will create a task here and I will call it create reminders to do app organization video and that has a bunch of components to it that I need to work
through to finish this so I will create another reminder another to do and then I will go command and the square right bracket and that outends it and makes it a subtask and I will call it write up outline of video edit video uh well we have to record the video before editing the video that'd be great um upload video to YouTube sorry this is funny um and publish video and like I say share video on social media okay so together these are the steps that I need to work through to complete this project so
projects we are representing them as tasks with subtasks and you'll see that this particular task is now bold meaning it has subtasks so we can collapse the subtasks or expand them if we want and of course we can check off these individual you know to do's and check off the complete project I recommend against making your projects separate lists in the outline here because if we wanted to make this project create reminders to have organization video if we represented that as a list in here then by the time we were done we would just have
to delete it from here there's no way to complete a list you can only delete lists and that's a shame because then it will never show up under completed okay so I recommend showing projects like this now of course not everything is a project sometimes you just have a specific task that says um update YouTube channel picture or something like that that's just an individual task and it lives right here so this is a task and this is a project okay now next up we are going to use the date property to denote deadlines so
you'll know or maybe you don't know but now you know that Apple reminders has a date property so I can actually go to a particular task and I can assign it a date let's choose an example that's a little bit more relevant and that is by a present for Martha's birthday okay so that's a task that we might have to do now let's say that Martha's birthday is actually November 11th okay boom then we want to assign a date of November 11th to that particular task why is that that's because this is the due date
the deadline the last possible Day by which we need to do this or else there are some negative consequence that's meaningful so in this case not having a present for her birthday right but of course there's a difference between the date when you absolutely need to get something done by and the moment when you do it you often want to do things ahead of time that's good productivity practice so we think of the date that we have inside Apple reminders as the deadline as I absolutely need to get this done by November 11th at the
latest but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to wait until November 11th to do this so how are we going to solve this particular issue and by the way just just another example another example might be pay the rent and maybe pay the rent is due by November 25th okay so again then we'll assign November 25th this is if this is like the last possible day that we need to pay the rent by all right okay now we don't just want to denote when this absolutely has to be done by we also want to
have some way of saying when are we actually going to work on this and so that's the next step it is to use flags to denote hey I plan to work on this today or I plan to work on this next so what we're going to do is we're going to say well you know what buying a present from Arthur's birthday I have to do it by November 11th at the latest but I'd actually like to do this sooner than that so what am I going to do I'm actually going to click inside this task
right here there we go and I'm going to click the flag icon now it becomes a flag task and you'll see that we have this built-in flagged View and if I click that this task will show up right here now we are going to use that to denote hey I want to work on this today and we're to help us with this we are actually going to set up a smart list now smart lists are pretty cool here's how that works we create at we click add list a new list and we are going to
call it today actually I know there's already a today view but we're going to hide that one we're going to call it today and we're going to click make it into a smart list and then we're going to say this smart list should show all of our reminders that either um are flagged so flag this flagged or that have a date sorry due date of today and then we will click include past due okay so incomplete items that are passed through we're also going to show it in this today view then I'm going to click
ok now we've got this new smart list over here and let's just um no we can drag it we have to right click and go pin list okay and then what we'll do is we want to hide this one you do that by going to view then going to show smart list and just unchecking today boom now we've got our own custom built today smart list that lives here what this is going to do is this is going to show every single task that we flagged meaning we'd like to work on this today or that
has a due date of today so let's create a task that has a due date of today which is check in for flight check in for flight let's say that has a due date of today boom now it's going to show up under today because today is going to show both this task because it's due today and this task because we flagged it okay so this is how we make that distinction next up what are we going to do we are going to set up some tags is this optional to organize within an area so
for example for my work I have a podcast and I have this YouTube channel right here maybe I want to have a way of seeing all my podcast tasks at the same time and seeing all my YouTube tasks at the same time without creating many many lists over here okay so the way that I can do that is I can actually create a task let's say invite a few more guests to my podcast I can give this one by clicking this button right here or just starting to type right here a podcast tag um podcast
there we go boom a little bit finicky sometimes on the Mac by the way guys reminders um on iPhone and iPad this is all a little bit smoother this is a YouTube task so I'm going to do hashtag YouTube and this is also a YouTube thing so I'm going to give this a hashtag YouTube task as well tag as well there we go okay so now what I can do is I can actually go and if I scroll to the bottom I'll see my tags over here I can click YouTube see all of my YouTube
tasks and I can click podcast unclick YouTube see all of my uh podcast tags now there's a bunch more you can do with this and to learn you know the details of what you can do with all this you should watch another video I did on Apple reminders with a bunch of Apple reminders tips and I'll make sure to link you to that video at the end of this video okay all right so you can sort of use tags to subdivide areas this way that's how I would do that now let's move on we can
set up some templates so there's a very cool templates feature in reminders now and let me show you how that works oh by the way let me just move this is a health thing I'm just going to move it to health it's generally good practice to try and keep your inbox clear but we'll talk more about that too now let's say that I wanted to create a template so for example this YouTube video thing right here I'm gonna do that a bunch of times because I keep producing YouTube videos all the time it'd be really
helpful to have a template to be able to work through now unfortunately you cannot make tasks with subtasks into templates you can only make lists into templates so that's a limitation of things or of reminders but let's work with it anyway so I will create a list and I'll call it create a YouTube video and I'll click OK what I will do is I'll actually grab these tasks and I'll copy them and paste them into here that didn't work ah I feel like it should have worked whatever I'll drag them into here for now next
I will just grab these and out Dent them and remove the top level tasks because we now have this as a list then I will go to file and click save as template and we'll call it create a YouTube video and click create now now that I've done that I'm just going to move those back over to work and I'm going to call it create oh and I'm going to create that task here call it create YouTube video about Apple reminders and I'm going to to put all of these uh back underneath here as you
can see this is a little bit messy and you might lose some information like for example the order in which these tasks were which is too bad really um there we go okay but now we have that template so let me delete this task over here and then I can go to add list and then under templates I can see that create a YouTube video right is right here so the next time I want to create a YouTube video I will do this I will click create list and I have a new list that has
all of these steps now all I have to do is to do the reverse process is grab these and just drag them into the work area or list and then go ahead and delete this one so it's a little bit unfortunate that templates only work with these lists and we're not using lists to denote projects but you can still use templates this way you just have to move things around a little bit more okay so that's using templates in this system now next up we want to set up a weekly review project that repeats you
know weekly weekly reviews are very important so um we can put this under admin for example and let's create a task quality weekly review now a weekly review has a bunch of sub steps it has for example indent process physical inbox process email inbox process reminders inbox process notes created in the created in the past week make sure all areas projects and to Do's are up to date and check upcoming events and deadlines that's roughly my weekly review process now what I want to do is I want this to be something first of all um
that I do it on Sundays today is a Sunday so I will actually assign this a date of today then I will click on the I icon over here and just say repeat weekly and then you can actually click custom and just click on Sunday and now that will repeat every week on Sunday so today as I work through this I can check it off and then what I can do is I can go to the schedule View and I can see that on next Sunday we've got the next weekly review project schedule so that's
pretty convenient okay we are almost done I just want to do a couple more things I just want to hide lists that we won't be using so in this case I don't really I won't be using the flag list over here so I can go to view show smart list and flagged because everything that's flagged is really meant for today so we're going to see that here now assigned is a feature that you can actually assign to Do's to someone else who is you know also an Apple device user um which is not something that
I use very often so I'm just going to go view show smart list assigned and get rid of that and then we have this nice little four views right here that I might use today scheduled all which is just everything across all of my lists and completed okay now the last thing that I recommend that you do is set up widgets on your iPhone and iPad you can have some really nice widgets for the reminders app and to learn how to do that I recommend that you watch my reminders tips video I did a video
with a bunch of reminders tips where I show you a lot of stuff that I didn't show you in this video which is not so much about how to organize it but more about what are actually all the things that you can do with reminders so go ahead and watch that video next thanks so much for watching um give it a thumbs up if you liked it if you have any questions about this setup do leave a comment or either way leave a comment and let me know what you think I'm also open to suggestions
for improvement hey thanks for watching have a nice day ciao
