How to Create Project in Reminder via Shortcuts

by Rian

This one is a ‘reminder’ (no pun intended) for anyone who had migrated over from other task managers. On Apple’s Reminder, you can mimic the project-like behavior (i.e. putting sub actions underneath the parent) by simply dragging what will be a child under the project. In other words, there are GUI implementations of making a project. What didn’t occur to me was how it was implemented over on the Shortcuts side.

On Shortcuts, unlike most task managers I’ve worked with, you can pass a newly created reminder as a variable to the next action without searching for it again. In the actual actions it would look like this:

• Using “New Reminder” action, [my project name]
• Using “New Reminder”, [action for project], and choose “Parent Reminder” and select the action that created [my project name], no need to search for it.
  

With other task managers I’ve used so far, linking an action as a parent is an invalid variable. The apps don’t know where the newly created reminder is, even though it was just done in the same shortcut. Whereas with the Reminder app, it somehow keeps tracks of where the references lead to. No need to jumping through the hoops to find the newly created project as a middle action.

Because this one focuses primarily on the idea side, I’ll simply make an example. Let’s assume you have periodic “buy groceries” project: one, check fridge and pantry, two, go shopping. You can create a shortcut that repeats weakly, and it won’t need to find the “project” to add sub-reminder to the parent. In my experience, the overhead from finding a project usually caused automation to fail — you wouldn’t need to worry about it with this method.