Ah but I AM handling all that in Apple Calendar easily. The key for me is to keep calendar vs task management totally separate.
I also realzed that I have almost never used reminders, as in set an alarm or notification for some thing. I just never do it. So I’m probably not the best to even understand why they should be combined since I never use timed notifications.
So luckily Apple have made their calendar sufficient for your work usage. My work requires a bigger enterprise wide system and Apple is insufficient for that. And for my sanity, I need to keep my multitude of personal tasks and appointments in a mostly separate head space so I can switch off from work when I’m not at work.
But unluckily for me (and the rest of the 2.5k seekers who googled and found this thread) Apple have deemed that I can’t view my reminders in context with the rest of my days’ tasks, even if I want to, despite them allowing multiple shared subscribed calendars to be customised and toggled on and off. So their reminders app is useless for my purposes, whilst setting up short calendar events is a clunky way of getting my reminders to show up on my calendar.
I agree, you sound like a good candidate for something like Fantastical. You can make Apple Reminders and Todoist tasks appear alongside your calendar appointments and you’ll still get notifications. You’ll also have faster task entry and more useful iPhone widgets to give daily overviews and/or show what’s up next. Calendar sets are filters that remove a ton of cognitive overhead if you have any calendars you only need to see periodically.
Just noting because this is the second time you’ve mentioned it - the view count on MPU doesn’t necessarily equate to the number of people that Googled looking for a solution. It’s always possible, but this is a pretty big forum with lots of users. And it’s a safe bet that lots of them at least click into each thread that looks even remotely interesting.
And the more the discussion goes on, the more people might revisit, bumping the count even more. 
While you’re waiting for Apple to see the proverbial light, try out BusyCal or Fantastical. See how those work for you. You might find a very nice, streamlined workflow that works better for your purposes.
You can also add notifications on reminders at a specific time, but you won’t have the visual reminders in your calendar. If you need to do these things at a certain time, then you should just make them calendar items. But you will have to have the discipline to do them at that specific time and you will need to make sure nothing comes in between your scheduled tasks.
As mentioned before by others, you may want to look into a calendar App like Fantastical which does make it possible to show reminders in your calendar.
Thanks Webwalrus, I’ve been waiting in hope for Apple to see the proverbial (Nokia) light for a long time now so I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. But I half thought there might be an alternative mentioned in this thread.
The Fantastical interface looks interesting but I don’t need the majority of the whistles and bells and I’ve just had a look at the Fantastical reviews on the iPhone App Store and I think I agree with the very many one star reviewers who do not wish to pay a subscription, apparently an expensive one at that, in order to use the app on more than one device, and the fact that some reviewers were not able to set end dates to calendar events, or events were not synching back to apple calendar or were not getting alerts and having trouble getting support, makes me not trust it, considering the alerts and reliability are the main feature I need. Also it would be a disaster for me to lose old data as I need it as a record of old events, so I am a bit sceptical about trusting a small app developer with critical data synching and functionality like organising my entire families life, so better to continue to put up with inconveniences on Apple’s calendar, I think.
Scrolling through the App Store, however, shows a number of calendar apps that do see the value in integrating reminders, but as I said, I think for better or worse I’m wedded to Apple.
Subscriptions are even more of a pet hate of mine than being railroaded into Apple’s way or the highway. I’d far rather pay a premium one time price than subscribe, and so I’m keeping my subscriptions to only the absolutely necessary bare minimum.
The visual reminders on the calendar are my point.
Threads like this make me pine for the return of OpenDoc.
Forget the Metaverse I simply want the unique functionality of apps to be tied together for the greater good.
Why? Again, my entire reason for wanting them all listed together with events in my calendar is so that I can dynamically attend to them or not, make dynamic decisions about priorities and flick things to a later time or date and see at a glance how they fit into the overall day, or the overall day that I’m considering flicking them to.
I don’t rigidly block out my entire day hour by hour because the unexpected demands of others do not make this possible. It might work in a professional context but not in a personal context coordinating kids, kids friends, kids school, husband, family friends, caring for elderly mother, volunteering, the dog, etc etc all of whom have their own calendars which do not integrate with mine or none at all and no respect for mine. It all needs to be managed, coordinated and juggled flexibly and on the go. So I need to see them all in one place and be reminded of things throughout the day.
FYI goodtask has the ability to see completed tasks, everything in one view, or sliced and diced in any way you want it. It really is uber customizable, but not the most user friendly (recommend checking the forums and asking to have someone help you set it up). It has taken a while but you can make any customized view you want.
From above (see my reply to your much earlier comment, and seeing you are using goodtask).
Goodtask has weird conventions in naming but once you get over them it works great. I agree for life calendar and tasks together is amazing. The “view” aka list vs day vs week etc refers to showing the calendar events. Then you put your filters for which “tasks” to show on the day.
I have several set up, for example my week view shows tasks the next 7 days and events next 7 days (and then switching to the board view allows me to drag/drop to the day I want).
I also have a “weekly review” list, where I only show list with tasks that were completed during the past week. It does everything you want just requires some setup to get it there.
Thanks jmanko16. I actually do use good-task. I started using it when COVID lockdown and work from home happened for work. I use old school paper diaries at work for juggling daily tasks and making notes that I keep separate from my formal work online calendar and scribble on a lot and I was looking for something similar in an app that I could see at home as well as on site, but alongside my personal calendar which might have personal events that affect work-from-home.
But you are right that it isn’t user friendly and I know I am definitely using it wrongly but I had the quaint idea that work-from-home would be short lived so I have been using good task wrongly for too long now.
I like the fact that you can see tasks, reminders and calendars in one place, (sort of), but the events and reminders are not listed together in time order including all calendars ie they are displayed separately on different panes, which isn’t actually that much better than having separate apps, and it isn’t user friendly enough to replace Apple calendar for using on the go.
You can actually adjust which order and which calendars/tasks show up in which view. You do have to go and customize, but GoodTask easily does everything you want it to do just takes a bit of tweaking. And you can have as many different custom views for lack of a better term that you want.
You wouldn’t see sync or data loss issues using Fantastical. I agree with the reviews left around 3.0 launch time pointing out rough spots, though. It’s different many updates later.
I personally would pay $40/year to make significant organizational problems go away (bells and whistles are what reduce cognitive overhead), but I’m glad you are figuring out how to do it only incurring one-time expenses and sticking with Apple stock apps.
I do not want to review my calendar each day to know which ‘tasks’ I have finished and which not, and then reschedule again those tasks I did not finish. I can look at my task list to know what I need to do, if things do not get finished they stay on my task list… no need te reschedule, no need to move things around.
The calendar is my ‘Hard Landscape’, (almost) everything on my calendar(s) is a commitment with a date and time and a place. A fictive due-date on a task will have no meaning. The result is that at a certain time due dates will have no meaning anymore if I could just change them to my liking. The effect in the end is that I cannot trust my system anymore.
But this is my view based on the GTD system, which takes some effort to get used to. Off-course you are free to use whatever works for you!
Fantastical works very well, both as a calendar and with tasks/ Reminders. I agree that the subscription price seems high, but it is a quality App, but also one with many bells and whistles you probably do not need.
If a quality App given you the tools to be organised and you use them daily then I guess it is worth paying for it, and in case of a calendar App like Fantastical you won’t lock-in your data anyway.
I’m not familiar with Goodtasks, but as I hear it also very capable for what you need.
I can appreciate that YOU don’t want all your tasks and events lined up in one place together, you’d rather just look at your to-do list, but you were telling me it was me who would HAVE to have the discipline to do everything according to a rigid schedule just because I want to see them all in one place, hence i questioned why you thought It was me who would have to be so disciplined.
But it is the exact opposite for me. I can choose when to fit in the high priority but non-time dependent tasks and reminders vs the low priority tasks and reminders better when I can see them all together and I get an alert for the reminder that must be done just prior to, or on the way home from, some fixed event and I can remove the mental load of having to remember the task because I can see it in the list and know it is taken care of and will alert me at a time I’ve chosen.
But I don’t necessarily have to follow through with it at the precise time it is scheduled, because I can easily readjust or quickly postpone the reminder alarm because I can see the rest of my fixed schedule events in front of me when I’m quickly considering when to reschedule the reminder, (ie I don’t have to open another app to do so) and I can rest assured that I will get an alert at the newly chosen time, which will be an appropriate time to be alerted because I have considered the events context, and I can securely put it out of my mind for the time being, knowing I won’t forget the milk on the way home because at a glance I can see there is an alert to do it after the event.
Having them all in one place actually makes it way easier for me to shuffle them flexibly and intelligently on the run in the light of some other unexpected priority that crops up, and in the light of some major fixed event that has slipped my mind, which happens all the time.
But doing it rigidly with all my day entirely blocked out time wise via your method would not allow room for the constant adjustments I have to make. If I had to go to a separate to-do list I might reorder them inappropriately and would be more likely to not fit them into an unexpectedly altered calendar or set an inappropriate alarm time because I have forgotten that dentists appointment that I scheduled 6 months ago, or not realise I had clashing reminders in too short a time space.
I do not recall telling you keep to a tight schedule, English is not my native language, so maybe something in my communication gave that impression.
What I meant was:
When someone puts everything in a calendar you need to be disciplined to follow your calendar, or to review your calendar regularly for past items and future items. For example:
If I have a task “create report X for project Y” and I intend to work on that on a Friday at 15:00 and put that as a reminder in my calendar. But at 14:45 I get a call and I need to do something else, chances are I will forget about that task. I wil also not be reminded about that task anymore because it will not be visible on my calendar if I revisit it on a later time.
Also, if I view my calendar it shows my commitments, mentally this tells me that those blocks are not available for something else. If I would start putting things on my calendar that I might do, but could easily reschedule if I do not get to them, I cannot trust my calendar anymore. Due dates would loose their meaning if I can just ignore them.
In my opinion putting everything on the calendar creates a schedule for which is clear that it will not be followed. So why go through the hassle of creating a schedule impossible to follow and then moving around stuff during the day to create a new schedule that probably will not be followed.
It’s like telling someone (in this case yourself): “I will do that tomorrow at 13:00”. But if you don’t follow-up on that commitment because something else came up, that someone will not be happy if that happens often.
Keeping the things I want to do apart from my calendar would prevents me from the need to shuffle them around to another fictive due-date and time in the future. I also do not want to be actively notified about thing I might do at that time, because of my ADHD this will distract me and disturb the work I was doing at that time too much. I trust that the things I need to do are in my lists, and if I have time to work on them a can look at those lists.
This is one of the hard things to grasp for many people (me included) that start following the GTD method. It is a different way of thinking about commitments. Either way, we benefit from the discipline to review our task-lists and calendars regularly.
Off-course you should find-out and choose the system that works best for you!
In the contrary, I do not want to rigidly block the entire day. The only things that are blocking segments off my dat are appointments on my calendar, like: visit doctor, meeting with Paul, Bring kid to sports club, etc. These are things that need to happen on that specific day and time, I cannot just ignore them or reschedule them to my liking.
My tasks are not scheduled, they do not have a due-date so I do not have to adjust any schedule or reorder any tasks during the day.