More out of Apple Reminders
Built by someone who spent ten years as a product manager and a founder, living inside task lists. If you think in mind maps, this is how you will want to run your work.
macOS 14 and later. Free to download, with no account to make.
Do we work the same way
01 / The problem
Siri, the Lock Screen, your watch, a Shortcut. Nothing catches a task faster than Apple Reminders, and that is exactly why yours has three hundred of them in it.
Then it stops. There are no groups inside a list, no tree, and the moment you tick something it is gone. So the plan lives in your head, or in a second app you have to keep in sync by hand.
The usual answers both ask you to move house. Things and Todoist want you to import everything and abandon Reminders. Mind map apps treat the drawing as the truth and push tasks out one way, so what you add on your phone never comes back.
02 / The answer
Open ReminderMAP and the reminders you already have are already there, grown into a map you can group, nest and rearrange as deep as the work actually goes, across lists. There is no import step and no empty canvas.
Everything you change is written straight back through Apple's own interface, so Siri, your watch and your iPhone keep working exactly as before. What ReminderMAP adds on top is the part Reminders has no field for.
03 / What you get
The first three are free forever. The three after them are what the subscription pays for.
Open it and there is a map. The reminders you already have grow into a tree by list and by group, nesting as deep as the work goes, and one branch can pull tasks from several lists at once. Drag a task and it lands where you put it. The number of groups is not capped.
Change something here and it is in Reminders immediately. Capture with Siri, the Lock Screen or your watch and it is on the map. It all goes through Apple’s own interface, so nothing stops working the way it did.
No account, no cloud, no telemetry. The planning layer is a file on your Mac, backed up automatically and exportable to JSON at any time.
Todo, doing, stuck, parked, where stuck carries a line about what it is waiting on. In a plain list the only way to express that is to push the date again, which loses the reason and leaves a task that merely looks late.
PaidReminders throws a task away the moment you tick it. Here the month is still there, and so is the month before that, grouped by list with repeating tasks folded into one line. The current month is free to look at. Reaching further back is the paid part.
PaidNot your reminders, which free tools already do. The planning layer: groups, states, what a task is stuck on, what you finished last month. Ask your assistant to do a piece of work and it can set that task to stuck with the reason, at the moment it hits a missing credential. It knew, and you did not.
Paid
04 / Where your data lives
Dates, lists and completions are written into Apple Reminders, so they are yours the way they always were.
Everything ReminderMAP adds on top is a file on your Mac. It works offline, and you can export the whole thing to JSON whenever you like.
05 / Who makes it
This app came out of my own problem. Nothing on the market was a to do tool that thinks in mind maps, and nothing was a mind map simple enough to run my reminders from. So ReminderMAP happened.
If you write code, there is also an open source edition you can try. Suggestions are welcome, and they come straight to me.
06 / What it costs
The map, unlimited groups, two way sync, backups and export are free permanently, with no countdown. Connecting your AI, the four states, and reaching back through past months are what the subscription pays for.
Prices may vary by region. There is a free trial on the yearly plan. What each tier includes.
07 / Getting it
Open it and the reminders you already have are on screen before you have configured anything. Most of what you see is free permanently, with no countdown at the end of it.
Three things are paid: connecting your AI, the four states with their reasons, and reaching back through the months you have finished. Billed monthly or yearly, with the first two weeks of the yearly plan free.