0:00 Stop paying for subscriptions to a bunch of different apps. And let me show you how to use Apple Calendar, Apple Notes, Apple Reminders, and Apple Mail all together to create the only productivity system you need. Now, this will be less about the features of each of these individual apps because I have already made some videos on Apple Notes and Apple reminders that I do recommend you watch. So, I'll link those down below. But today, we'll be focused more on how you can actually use these apps together. So, some tricks and honestly even some hacks to get them to work together in the best possible way. Thankfully, since iOS 18 came out last fall, using the calendar app with reminders has gotten so much easier because now they're integrated. So, when
0:47 you're in the calendar app, when you press the plus button to add an event, you can add an event the way you normally would, but you'll now see an option for reminders. And you'll see the same options here as you would within the reminders app. So, you can give it a title, add any notes, and you can, of course, set a date and time for the reminder. If you do give it a time, it'll show up at that specific time on your calendar. But you also have the option of toggling off the time and just having it at the top as kind of an all day reminder. Now, if you've tried adding a few reminders this way and you don't see them on your calendar, head over to the calendar button in the top left and just make sure that scheduled reminders is checked off so that it's
1:34 visible on your calendar. And the great thing is if you are though already in the reminders app and you want to create a new reminder that way because you're just already here, as long as you give the new reminder a date and time, it'll still appear on your calendar. So adding an individual reminder to your calendar is obviously pretty easy, pretty straightforward. But what's tricky is when you want to add a list or multiple reminders to your calendar. So, let's say you have a packing list, for example, with multiple reminders or even your grocery list and you want to have that in your calendar so that when you go to the grocery store or you're running your errands, you have that list handy. Well, there's no easy way to do that because you cannot add or set a
2:20 date and time for the entire list. You can only do so for the individual items and that can obviously get very cluttered very quickly. But thankfully, there's a neat little hack to make this work. So, what you would do from the list you want in your calendar, you would hit the share button at the top and then scroll over to invite with link. If you don't see that, keep scrolling until more and you should see it as an option that you can move up to the top and then click on invite with link. And then you're going to share this list with yourself. So you can just put in your own email, whatever is associated with your Apple ID, your Apple account, and then click share link. It's going to create this link.
3:06 And then you can go back to the share button and just click copy link to make sure that link is now copied. So now I'm going to go into my calendar and create a new reminder. And let's call this one pack. And set the date and time as normal. So, let's say today at 2 p.m. I'm going to hit details. And at the bottom, you're going to see URL. This is where we're just going to tap to paste the link. Hit add. So, now we see our new pack reminder at 2 p.m. And when I click on it, I can actually click on the URL we pasted, and it'll bring me immediately to the packing list. And if I go into my today view for all the reminders I have today, you'll see I've done this with my grocery shopping and with that packing
3:53 list we just created. So you're basically setting it up so that you have a reminder linking to a reminder list. And when I click on that, it brings me right back into my packing list. Now, here are a few tricks for using the reminders app and the notes app together. So, let's say you have an Apple Note and you need to assign a deadline to it or just simply a reminder to talk about it. Like, I have this trip itinerary here that I need to remember to mention when I'm having dinner with my friends later today cuz we need to review our plans. So, what I would do from the Apple Note is hit the share button and make sure it's on send a copy here at the top. I see the reminders app. If you don't see the reminders app,
4:38 again, just scroll to the right, hit more, and select it from the list of suggested apps. And then I'm going to go ahead and hit reminders. And this is now going to have the typical reminders window, but it's going to populate all the information from the note. But you can, of course, customize it. So in this case, I'm going to tap in here and I'm going to say review trip with friends, let's say. And I'm going to leave all the note detail. That's fine for this. I'm going to click details. I'm going to assign it a date and time. So, today and I know my dinner is at 7. So, let's maybe put the reminder for 7:15. Let's say I have all the other options if there was anything else I wanted to change. And I'm going to hit add. So, now when I go over to the reminders app
5:24 in my today view, I'll see the reminder we just created. So, tonight review trip with friends and it links to the Apple note. So, I can just click on that if I want to actually get in to see all of the trip details. But the other option is, let's say I don't want to create a reminder for the entire note, maybe just a section. What you can do is just highlight the text that you want included in your note. So, I know once I've confirmed my travel details with my friends tonight, I have some time set aside tomorrow morning to actually book our flights. So, in this case, I'm just going to highlight all of the flight options. I'm going to use the little popup menu that appears and click share. See the exact same options. So, I'm going to hit reminders. This time it
6:11 prepopulates the note title, but just the flight option text. So, I'm going to change the title again. Let's say book flights details tomorrow morning at let's say 10:00 a.m. Add. And then when I go into reminders, I'll see just the flight options this time as a separate reminder. So that's how easy it is to send an Apple note to the reminders app. But let's say now I want to do the reverse. I want to take a reminders list and add it to one of my Apple Notes because I'm super organized and I want this packing list basically embedded in my trip itinerary so that everything's neat and in one place. What I would do for that is again go up to the share button from the reminders list. And now
6:59 I'm going to scroll over until I see notes. I'm going to click notes. I'm going to again share it with myself. So type in my own email and hit share link. Then this time it's going to bring up an Apple notes window. So, you can actually pick click in to pick which note you want to save this to or you can create a brand new note. So, I want to add it to my trip to New York. There's even a spot to add a note if you did want to add any additional context. And I'm going to hit save. And if I go into my Apple note at the bottom, you're now going to see that packing list right in the note. And I can even drag it up so that it's part of my packing section. And if I am in the
7:45 note and I want to remember or check off or add anything, I can just click on the packing list and it'll bring me right into that reminder. So, so far we've looked at calendar and reminders and reminders and notes. But let's see how the three can work together. So, to add a note to the calendar, there's two ways to do this. And the easiest way is to do it through the reminders app. So, as I've shown, you can quickly share a note with the reminders app through that share button at the top, switching it to send copy, and hitting the reminders app. As long as you then give the reminder a due date, date and time, it will automatically add it to your calendar. Because again, reminders and the calendar are now integrated. And if you remember earlier when we were
8:32 looking at this, I already did it. So, if I go over into my calendar app at my dinner with my friends tonight, you'll see that reminder to review the itinerary note with my friends. And if I click on show in reminders, it'll bring me to the reminder. I can click in and see all the details from the note or I can click on the note icon to bring me into the actual note if I wanted to see it in more detail. But let's say instead I want to share the note with my calendar without going through reminders because maybe in my calendar I have a time block that's entirely dedicated to working on the note. So I don't also need a reminder. I just need to go from
9:17 that calendar invite to the note. So what I would do for that is go from the note, click on the share button again. This time we are going to make sure it's on collaborate. We're going to go over to invite with link. Guess what? We're going to share it again with ourselves and hit share link. I'm going to again just copy the link to make sure it's copied. Go into my calendar. Then from the calendar app, I can create a new event through the plus button. Or in this instance, because I already have my time set aside, I'm just going to edit this event where it says URL at the bottom. I'm going to paste that link into there and hit done. And done again. When I sit down at my desk to plan the trip, I can just click on the calendar invite. That iCloud link is there, I'm
10:04 going to click on it and it'll bring me right into the note. So, those are what I would consider the three main Apple productivity apps. But now, we need to talk about the mail app because sometimes a calendar invite or a reminder will start from an email you receive or you'll get an email with new information that you need to add to a reminder or a note. So, to add an email to the calendar app, there's a few ways of doing this. If you get an email, like let's say a dinner reservation that has a clear date and time in the text of the email, it's really easy to just click on the date and time and add it to your calendar or even add to reminders. But let's say you get an email like this one that does not have a date and time, but
10:51 you do want to add it to your calendar. It's a little bit trickier, but here's what you would do. Go to your email list, and you kind of need two hands for this. You're going to basically hold and drag the email. So, I'm going to hold and drag the email and use my other hand to swipe over to my calendar. And then I can just place it on the calendar to create a new event. It's going to autopop populate the title, but I can always click in to change that. And you'll see instead of the URL now it says show in mail. So once the event is how I want it, I'll just hit add and that new event's there. When I click on it, I will see that show and mail and it'll bring me right to the email. An easier way to do that though if you are on your iPad is just to go into split
11:39 view with both the apps and then hold and drag onto the calendar. But then another thing you can do from this split view is if you have an existing event, you can click into that and edit. Go down to that URL, take that same email, drag it and drop it into the URL field and hit done. Now the same thing, you'll see the show an email and it'll bring you to that email. So those are the two different options if you want to add an email to an existing event or create a brand new calendar event for the email. Now, for mail and reminders, you can do a few things here as well. What's interesting though is the mail app actually does have its own reminder feature. So, in an email here at the
12:26 top, you'll see a little like clock. If you click on that, you can set a reminder for this email. But this does not actually talk to the reminders app. This is just the email itself. So, that is sometimes helpful. But if you do actually want to add an email to the reminders app, you can do that as well. And so to do that, you can select all the text or part of the text from the email and then hit share from the menu that pops up and you'll see the reminders app option. You can just click that. And then this should look familiar at this point. You can change the title, the text of the reminder, and hit details to see all of your options. And again, if you do set a date and time for
13:12 this reminder, it will also add it to the calendar, but I won't show that one again just for now. We're going to add this as a reminder. Go into our reminders app. And now you'll see at the bottom here, you have a reminder with the email or with the mail app icon this time. If you click on that, it'll bring you into the email. It would be so much easier if that reminder feature in the email actually did that, but for whatever reason right now it does not. You could also do the same drag and drop trick as well. If you're on an iPhone, that's definitely the way to do it. But if you are on an iPad on the bigger screen, I would instead just go
13:59 to the split view, choose the mail app, and then just drag from this small distance instead. And then let's say you got an email from a friend who created the trip itinerary for you, but you yourself want to add it to Apple Notes. So, what I would do is highlight and select all or use the handle to adjust which part of the email you do actually want to convert into a note. Then I'm going to hit the share button. I'm going to slide over until I see notes and click on that. And then you can click in here to add the new note to any of your existing notes or click to create a brand new note. And it will take whatever the first line is as
14:45 the title of the note to avoid confusion because I do already have my own note with this title. I'm just going to delete that. And I'm going to hit save. And then when I go into notes, you're now going to see that brand new note we just created from the email here as a standalone note. Another option would be to again hold and drag the email and then just add it to the note as a hyperlink. So this is great if you do want to add let's say any of your confirmations from your trip for hotels, flights, any shows or anything like that. If you want to add them really easily to your like master itinerary document or note just so you have it handy, you can do that. They'll all be added at the bottom as a hyperlink and
15:32 then if you click on that link, it'll bring you into the email. And the hyperlink will pull from the email subject, but you could always just long press on the hyperlink and hit edit link if you wanted to change the name or the text. So, those are all of the tricks that you need to know to make Apple's native productivity apps work together. Now, was this a perfect system? Definitely not. There were a lot of hacks that we needed to kind of force them to work together, but they are always adding new features like the calendar and reminders integration they just added last year. That's wonderful. So, hopefully they keep just adding these features so that they do work more seamlessly together. However, the benefit of this system is one, these
16:18 apps are already on your devices. So, it's free in that sense, your device comes with them, and two, because of iCloud and the Apple ecosystem, this will sync across all of your Apple devices. And you can also do any of these hacks from any of your Apple devices. So, if you got value out of today's video, please let me know by giving it a thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any future videos. And if you are looking for more tips and tricks now, you should watch this video on Apple Notes and this video on Apple reminders. So, that's it. Have a great day. Bye. [Music]
