Which name? Calendar, or Reminders?
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Nothing personal, but I am not a fan of that phrase. In my work life it is more accurately described as “what most people are doing” and not a measure of quality or effectiveness.
Or perhaps to borrow from Churchill… it is the worst approach except for all the other ones.
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I’m very much in agreement with you. Mostly - for my clients - I try to give them tailored advice.
Calendar 
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No offense taken. 
And I absolutely agree that in many settings, “best practices” is absolutely a measure of "what everybody else is doing.
My impression with GTD though is that there’s a lot of cognitive science behind the methodology. I know people that have actually done research for David Allen.
And of course that brings us back to the larger issue…
I’m 100% behind tailoring systems to what works best for individuals. The broader question though, as it relates to this post, isn’t necessarily individualization as much as “what’s a sensible default approach for a major smartphone OS maker?”
Do you think Apple has radically missed the mark with its default apps?
No, I don’t, because most users want simple, and that’s arguably what Reminders and Calendar deliver.
My impression of GTD is that it is a sensible approach for people who want or need “an approach.” I don’t think that is most Apple users who just want to remember something, and they may have difficulty deciding where to enter things.
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The answer to your hypothetical is that Apple wants to provide basic but useful apps that are straightforward to use for the majority of their customers (who are not power uses like us). That said, I think the current Reminders and Calendars apps are fine for their customers and non-power users, but that other third party apps with more power and options are available for those who want them. Personally I use the Reminders and Calendar for my business and they work very well for me.
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On a slightly related note, why do search apps still exist when web browser apps provide the same exact functionality?
For example…
Or…
That’s a good question. I haven’t used the Microsoft apps as much, but would say some answers are:
- Home Screen presence retains users better than if they have to open a browser app. Less sophisticated users might even think the app is the only way to use Google.
- Defending search/category ranking. Google has the top two spots in the Utilities section.
- Functionality is not identical. The Google app, for example, is more than just a search portal; it provides a variety of notifications for your Google account, shows news, has some security functionality.
- The browser can be set to a different search engine and the search app can’t.
Many of the features in search apps could easily be integrated into web browser apps.
There are some UX benefits to splitting frequently, rapidly accessed functions into multiple apps when everything can’t fit on the bottom tab bar; this is especially the case for such a broadly used utility like Google that can’t afford to lose less sophisticated users.
Plus, as I said, there’s some strategic value to their approach. With browsers in particular, given their history and their presence in recent inquiries, it’s also important from an anti-trust perspective not to tie the browser and the search engine too closely together. A strong search app lets them present their browser more neutrally.
It just seems like such a strange thing to do these days.
I did. I still don’t understand why they’re separate apps.
reminders takes some time to figure out, but after a while its pretty handy.
i use it in conjunction with Fantastical. it works great - the two like one another.
to the point. perhaps its separate so as to reduce “incoherence” and increase use, being easily accessible as a separate app.
i can see the point of asking the question, though. when surfing the calendar one is reminded of “things to do” regarding entries.
moreover, there’s the thing call “layout hell” - too many windows within an app. separating the apps helps avoid this abyss.
somehow, and don’t ask me how, i’ve trained my brain like another poster above said. the calendar is to be AT A PLACE. i’ve started unconsciously approaching things in this way.
for integration the reminder to-dos into the calendar, it’s helpful to place due dates in the reminder. after a bit of use it’ll become intuitive, and you can tweak the date along as you move past the due date but haven’t completed the task.
EDIT -
too much integration is a bad thing.
lawyer, here. case management systems for lawyers are an example of too much integration. how so?
there’s basically two broad sides. Case management and Contact management. they sound joined at the hip and they are.
but they function best surgically separated. the problem is a practical one. you simply cannot do EVERYTHING you might do for a client in one “place”, efficiently. part of this is the app designer’s fault, leading to “layout hell” mentioned above.
i just moved to DT for case management. i’m building my own contact manager in file maker. commercial “client & case” management systems are unusable in my opinion. too many windows and clicks with no sense of “where you are”. DTs inherent architecture solves a lot of this. the CM i’m building is pretty much everything on one layout, with a few tabs on that one layout page. no need to “leave” the page to do something.
i’m working on integrating printing functions to both. it’ll take a while but i’ll get there.
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I found this thread because I’ve been living in hope that Apple would integrate calendar and reminders since I gave up my old Nokia and got sucked into the Apple way (or the highway) of doing things more than a decade ago.
I can’t be the only one as you have 2.7k views and I doubt that most of them are googling for the topic merely to disagree with you. But I do seem to be in the minority of people replying who also want this basic feature.
For those who don’t want to see their reminders and calendar items in one place, you are obviously not the parents of two or more young children and caring for an elderly parent with dementia still living at home and also working part time and volunteering and all while struggling with ADD.
I want my reminders to ping me at a set time, but I also want to be able to see in one place all my meetings and events as well as all the list of things I have to do for the day.
Before I started to use my Nokia phone calendar with reminders (rather than a paper diary) I was forgetting important things all the time because I was so busy things would always fall through the cracks. It became much easier to prioritise and flick some of the to-dos to the next day or to 4 days time because I could see in one place that is wasn’t going to be possible on the day I had intended, or conversely, I could sometimes get further through the to-dos that I’d ambitiously scheduled on that day than I expected. It was easy to transfer the to-do to a different date, based on seeing how busy I was going to be for that day, or whether a major event was scheduled or not, and I could scroll through the days seeing all the to-dos I’d planned for each day and know where there was some room for any additional to-dos. It changed my life and I stopped dropping so many balls.
Then came Apple calendar. I was really taken aback that they didn’t have the integration with reminders that I assumed every calendar would sensibly have. I couldn’t (and still can’t) see why they deem we should not be able to view all our to-dos and scheduled meetings in one place, and I keep hoping they will allow it, hence finding this thread. For those who don’t want to see them together, Apple allows you to turn on and off other subscribed calendars with a click so why not just turn on or off reminders from visibility as well?
In the mean time, in order to not clog my Apple calendar view on my phone, I leave it on month view, and scroll though the items in the preview window below that that show up for the day that I’m viewing it. That way the items show up as a list and I can see them in order. And instead of using reminders app, I set up zero or 5 minute “meetings” in Calendar for each reminder item and set them for the time that I want to be reminded of them, but I can see them in the same place as the other calendar events.
This doesn’t look very good in day or week view, but it does give me the day’s entries in list form for each day on my phone, which is where I need it wherever I am.
So for example my day list might include (among other things) “remember to call mother” set with an alert at 11am, “do the shopping” set at 12pm, “2pm pick up daughter 1 from netball” along side of “Vet appointment 3-3.30pm” and “clean bathroom today - mother in law coming for dinner” alert set for 4pm (because the morning was full of other tasks and meetings) with a calendar event for “mother in law for dinner” on the shared calendar with my husband. The previous day I might want to flick a task I hadn’t completed and I can see at a glance that this day was not a good day to flick it to.
I am just far more likely to fit everything in that I have to juggle, including reminding myself the night before if there is an early event the next morning if I can see it all in one place and still be able to easily see the exisiting events and tasks on another day if I’m choosing another day to flick something to. And if a calendar event requires any prep, such as making a cake to bring, or buying something on the way, I can include a reminder zero minute event to cook or go to the shop that shows up in my calendar and alerts me at the time I choose and effectively blocks out that time for any other to-dos I might want to flick to that day.
I guess I will just have to keep clunkily setting up zero minute meetings (with alerts and attached notes) for every to-do that I would otherwise use an integrated reminders list for. But if I have to look at two calendars to see my reminders I will miss things regularly by forgetting to look at it until it is too late to prep, or scheduling it in haste while on the go for a busy day when I can’t actually do it etc etc.
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Is there another app that shows everything in one calendar day view (and allows a time-ordered list view for the day view) and also allows showing reminders at set times in the list with alerts at set times, alongside and ordered by time with events on shared apple calendars (such as with your partner) that also have alerts, as well as birthdays from contacts and which synchs to all your devices on iCloud? (ie something I can fully replace apple calendar with but also integrate reminders with notes attached and integrate with shared apple and google calendars) that is stable enough to remember history for several years (for a lasting record of when things were done)?
I use Good Task for scheduling daily tasks for work-from-home but it is not user friendly and doesn’t keep a record of what was scheduled for each day (that I can find) once a task is completed and I wouldn’t like to replace my home calendar with it, although it does have a clunky way of seeing everything from multiple calendars together. I know I’m using Goodtask wrong, but I set up new tasks each day so I can see them on the day they were scheduled rather than as a list of completed tasks disembodied from the days the task was worked on. I thought that would be temporary but WFH has carried on into its third year now so I’m keeping it going for work purposes, but because I never complete any of the tasks (or they will disappear from the day view I set them on) it is filling up with thousands of uncompleted tasks. But I do like the fact you can view them along side of my other calendar tasks.
If you are asking me, I don’t know. Maybe one of the Fantastical or BusyCal users can chime in and help…
How cool is that? This is one of the most useful tips I’ve come across in a long time.
I’ve been using Reminders more now that I have an Apple Watch. It works very well with the watch for grocery lists and for making quick entries in general. I find the Calendar app much less useful because you can’t quickly jump to days in the future or in the past—at least I haven’t figured out how to do it. If you combined the two apps it could make the Reminder component less useful. Keeping things modular might be good thing if you want apps to work across devices.
I used Fantastical and BusyCal prior to my retirement in 2018. Both are, IMO, excellent products but I preferred BusyCal on Mac & IOS. With the addition of BusyContacts the combination was a great personal CRM - until Apple blocked 3rd part access to Mail.app.
BusyCal for Mac has a 30 day free trial. BusyCal for IOS is $5.
BusyContacts has fixed that in versions >1.6 with a Mail add-in.