Master Smart Lists in macOS Reminders: Boost Productivity on Your Mac

Published Jul 27, 2023, 10:45 AM EDT

Adilia is a lawyer and a tech enthusiast who loves to talk about music, movies, and books. She's enjoyed reading about tech since she got her first smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 520.

Despite that, she started to feel interested in writing about tech when she could afford her first MacBook.

You'll find her binge-watching her favorite Netflix shows when she's not writing or trying to read a new book. 

Using the Reminders app on your Mac is the perfect way to never forget about an important meeting or event in your life. However, if you rely too much on the app, you probably have a lot of reminders sitting there waiting to be completed.

Sure, you could organize these reminders manually or make Smart Lists do it for you. Keep reading to find out how to organize your reminders with just a few clicks.

What Are Smart Lists?

As you can probably guess by the name, Smart List is a type of list you can use in the Reminders app. Usually, you can use lists to manually organize your reminders however you want.

With Smart Lists, on the other hand, you can set a certain number of filters or tags so the Reminders app organizes all your reminders for you.

That way, instead of searching for all your school reminders, you can filter the reminders with a "school" tag, and the Reminders app will automatically put all your school reminders in the same Smart List. It's one of the best ways to make the most of Reminders.

How to Create a New Smart List on Your Mac

The best part about Smart Lists is that they're super easy to create. All you need to do is follow these steps:

1. Open Reminders on your Mac.
2. Click (+) Add List in the bottom-left corner of the window.
3. Make sure you're in the New List tab.
4. Check the box next to Make into Smart List.
5. Add a name, color, and icon to your Smart List.
6. Now, start adding all the filters you want to use for your Smart List right below.
7. When you're done, click OK.

There are a lot of different filters you can use. If you want to add more filters, click the plus (+) button on the far right of the first filter. You can also click the minus (-) button to remove a filter.

You can choose filters like Date, Time, Priority, or Location. Play around with these settings until you create the Smart List that suits you.

How to Turn a Regular List Into a Smart List

Just like you can create a Smart List from scratch, you can also turn an existing list into a Smart List. The process is just as simple as setting up location alerts in Reminders.

1. Open Reminders.
2. On the left panel, under My Lists, click the list you want to turn into a Smart List.
3. Click File in the menu bar at the top.
4. Select Convert to Smart List from the dropdown.
5. Reminders will ask you for confirmation. All the reminders inside that list will be tagged with a tag with the same name as the list. If you're okay with this, click Convert.

And that's it! Yes, the list doesn't seem all that smart now, but you can change its filters by Control-clicking (right-clicking) the list on the sidebar and selecting Show Smart List Info. From there, you can change the filters and tags to whatever you want.

What to Do if You Can't Create a Smart List

If this is your first time using Smart Lists, or the Reminders app on your Mac, you might not be able to create Smart Lists from the get-go.

We experienced the same problem but fixed it by allowing the Reminders app to access iCloud. So, after you're done setting up iCloud on your Mac, you should give access to Reminders by doing the following:

1. Click the Apple menu in the menu bar and choose System Settings.
2. Click on your Apple ID name at the top. Then, click on iCloud.
3. Scroll down and select Show all under Apps Using iCloud.
4. Click the toggle next to Reminders to enable it.

It might take a while, but Reminders should let you create Smart Lists, as we showed you before.

Organize Your Reminders the Easy Way

The Reminders app is filled with a bunch of cool features you can use in your everyday life to boost your productivity. However, organizing all your reminders manually can be tricky.

If you don't want to go through all that trouble, you can easily use Smart Lists to keep your app and your life organized with just a few filters.