Reminders: Using Your iPhone for To-Do Lists

For this week’s posts I had originally planned on talking about the to-do list program (Toodledo) that I have been using on my phone for about a year, but with the release of iOS5 and the preinstalled Reminders program, I have switched to using it and I am very pleased! I will be walking through how I use this program and some of the great notification features. Like all of the to-do list programs I have used, however, this program has definite room for improvement.

The great thing about this program is that the interface is well organized and it is easy to view your tasks, but even better, it is very easy to set reminders for those tasks. I find that if I do not have a reminder set for the time I will need to see the task, I always forget to check the to-do list before it is too late. This means I end up having to postpone the task to another date. And who wants to do tomorrow what you can do today? I would rather knock off most of my to-do list items than have the tasks hanging ominously over my head until the next available time I have to take care of them. That will just mean less time for me to do things I want to do; instead I am stuck doing what I have to do.


When you open the program it automatically opens to List view which just shows you all the tasks you have saved to your lists in the order you added them. You can have multiples lists, and at this point I have a list called Reminders and another one called Homework that I only use to remind myself of items that are class related but not due so that I would not be using my calendar to remind myself of them already.


I do not like to view my tasks in “list view” though, so I immediately select the Date view tab at the top so that the program shows me today’s tasks. From there I can scroll through by day to see what I have to do. Unfortunately, the day is not organized by the times you set to complete the tasks, but at least in a day view it is easier to tell when you planned on doing what.


If you have this program hopefully you will give it a try. I will be posting throughout this week about setting up reminders, setting up your notification settings, and how to use the location feature of the program. Stay tuned!