Integrating better with Reminders

[pj47tech]

One aspect of Apple's native applications is that they integrate better with the OS. On the other hand, they tend to be less useful than 3rd party apps which have more features and abilities such as 2Do. I try to set up and use both types of apps for redundancy of anything critical.

One of the key task lists I use is for bill payments/alerts. When I first got my iPhone last fall I found Reminders a poor tool - it doesn't even organize them by due date! Having 20-30 entries in that list was useless to me. Searching task apps led me to 2Do as the best 3rd party solution.

However I still wanted some way for Reminders to work as a backup method for 2Do along with keeping a list in Microsoft Outlook. iCloud worked for the sync, but I found creating a special list structure for bill payments to be a solution for keeping Reminders a functional backup.

Ordinarily all I had in the past was a category called Payments. However now I have 5 lists and a single category or tag of Payments:

Payments 1
Payments 2
Payments 3
Payments 4
Payments Later

The first week's payments are in week 1 , etc., until week 5 and beyond is in the "Later" list. This keeps the lists in Reminders easy enough to read as there are 3-5 in the list. In 2Do, I created a separate tab of all items with the tag or category of Payments, and they all display there in order of due dates.

When a new week begins, I then move up the payments - "1" is empty by that time, so 2's entries move to 1, 3's to 2 and so on. Normally I do this in Outlook.

One benefit from this structure I had not foreseen is easily knowing all the bills due in the coming week or two. Due to business travel I often set up automatic bill payments ahead of time, and seeing Payments 1 and 2 completed was a good visual that I had everything accounted for ahead of time. I like this structure.

Having Reminders set up as a backup is helpful. I know GWT works hard to keep the 2Do app up to date, but we're all at the mercy of Apple and an occasional update may break something. Reminders is a functional backup in that rare case for a critical tool in my life.