It’s no secret that I think Reminders.app from Apple, and Notes from Apple are two of the most underrated productivity tools out there. I suspect people don’t use and talk about these more, because they lack the dopamine hit you get with purchasing a new thing to get better. It’s kind of like buying a gym membership to go walk on an indoor track, rather than walking around your neighborhood. Both accomplish the same thing, but with the gym you get to proof that you spent money to think about fitness, while making your fitness routine more cumbersome to actually do.
Anyways, Reminders fucking rocks.
It’s the best todo/reminder app I have ever used — and I helped build one back in the day. That’s how good it is. But there is one thing about it which has some friction: quickly adding new reminders can be an imprecise thing. When you add new reminders the app defaults to the day you are adding it in (in Today and Schedule views) or to no date and just assigned to a list (in list views). You can add due dates and such, but it’s buried in menus and requires a stupid amount of taps for anything beyond a random assignment of “today/tomorrow/this weekend (sometimes)/next week (sometimes)” so it’s not ideal for how most people think. If you type natural language time/date while entering, you’ll often get a quick suggestion for that, but not always.
Enter: Remind Faster.
It does what the name suggests, allowing for very rapid and quick entry of reminders, which drop into (err) Reminders. It’s fucking fantastic.
What It Does / Doesn’t Do
The app is a one trick pony: entering reminders, one at a time, with due dates, times, and the proper list selected, in a very quick fashion. It’s so fast that you can enter multiple reminders in the app using an iPhone keyboard, then you could using a keyboard and mouse on a iPad Pro in the actual Reminders.app.
Core options:
– Default list, with quick toggle to others on entry screen.
– Default quite tap due times, with a paid upgrade to configure the defaults yourself.
– Plus toggles to increment the due times.
– Quick add location based reminders with a tap
– Quick toggle to add a due day, with the default being a single tap for today or each of the next three days. There’s a stepper to increment forwards or backwards by a day with each tap.
– Dark/Light themes.
– Icon picker
– Detection for dates and times in the reminder title
– Support for Reminder notes
Basically, the app uses the baseline assumption that you likely always enter, or want to enter, reminders within the context of just a few different due times. It then allows you to set this up in a predefined manner. It’s not meant to do everything, it’s meant to do the common stuff much faster than you could in the Reminders app, while leaving the uncommon stuff to the main app.
In Use
This app is so fucking fast, that I not only love the app, but have started entering more reminders for things I would have otherwise kept in my head. It’s amazingly good at what it does.
It’s well designed, with the entire interface feeling open and encouraging about wanting you to input reminders, while being straightforward about how to use the app itself. It’s clean — a simple concept, but those are always the hardest to pull off really well. Remind Faster does this with precision.
It does have some imperfection with it. Keyboard support on the iPad is not as robust as it should be. There’s not shortcuts for jumping the cursor from the title to the notes, or setting/incrementing dates. It would be great to see keyboard shortcuts added to this app beyond the handful already there.
If you are someone who likes to use natural language input for Reminders, this apps does it much better than the Reminders app — and does it in a much more streamlined fashion. I’ve converted my habits to doing just that with this apps. It’s smooth and fast.
I used to setup only the large reminders, but with this app on my home screen, I am adding almost everything I need to do into the app. I can’t think of a better testament for a tool like this. Wait, I can: I keep Remind Faster and Reminders on my home screen together.
Overall
I absolutely love this app, and recommend it to everyone who uses Reminders. And if you are not using Reminders, you are missing out, because it’s a fantastic app.