Presenting your Reminders through Apple Shortcuts

How to increase productivity by saving time

This guide shows you how my shortcut Reminders works. The download/share link can be found at the bottom!

Ever find yourself wanting to use your iPhone’s reminders app, but always forgetting to check it? Sometimes it seems like even if we want to be more productive, we actually have to be productive to do so.

What came first, productive habits or productivity?

The shortcut in this guide allows you to easily gather reminders from any list, and present them as a notification to your Home Screen. This saves the time of viewing your reminders, and through automation, can actually help you remember that you have reminders.

If you’d like to learn more about automation or how to set it up, you can find the link at the bottom of this guide.

If you’ve never created a shortcut but would like to learn, be sure to check out this guide.

Reminders

To start, I wanted to make sure this shortcut could be used by other shortcuts. For example, when I run a school related shortcut, I may want to see my school related reminders as well. To add this feature, I decided to make use of Shortcut’s Input property.

If there is no input, we simply find all the reminders we have set for any list.

We then parse the shortcuts using the Find All Reminders action within the shortcut. We filter the list by the input if there is one, and we also only gather reminders that are not completed yet.

If we don’t have a given list, we want to be sure we don’t gather lists that don’t have a daily relevance, or can be gathered from an input. The lists I kept out were:

• School
• Groceries

We then count the amount of reminders we have, and start forming a notification text. A notification text is simply the notification’s text that will be presented to me whenever the shortcut is called. The notification text can be filled with other variables set during the shortcuts lifetime.

If there are no reminders, our notification text is

You have no reminders

If there are reminders, we begin the notification text with

Remember to:

and with each reminder found, we add another line to the notification text,

• Reminder Name

If there is only one reminder found, we simply input

Remember to Reminder Name

Once we have the notification ready, we push the notification. If we had a specific list input, we use that as the title followed by “Reminders.” If not, we simply put “Reminders” as the title for the notification. The notification is then inputted with the notification text variable, and pushed to our home screen.

Example:

Here is the download for the Reminders Shortcut

Here is the guide to automations

Thanks for reading :)