Get Reminders in Your Mac Menu Bar with Reminders MenuBar

If you use the Reminders app to keep track of things you need to do or be reminded of, on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, then you might appreciate having Reminders easily available in the Mac menu bar.

That’s exactly what the aptly named Reminders MenuBar does, it’s a free tool that places a fully interactive Reminders functionality behind a menu bar icon on MacOS, where you can quickly add new reminders, mark reminders as completed, and scroll through your list of reminders to see what else is on tap.

• You can grab Reminders MenuBar from Github here

FWIW if you’re new to GitHub you might find this tutorial on how to download Mac apps from Github to be useful, since it’s not always exactly obvious or intuitive.

When you first open Reminders MenuBar, you need to go through the increasingly Windows-esque permissions screens, first granting it permission to open, and then granting it permission to your Reminders. Once that is complete, the menubar icon has been added and it’s easily available from anywhere on the Mac.

Having Reminders in the menubar is useful enough that I would not be surprised if a future version of Reminders.app for Mac gains this feature natively, but for the time being the Reminders MenuBar application is available for free on Github, and is an excellent utility.

The primary issue that I have with the Reminders MenuBar app is that you can’t reverse sort by date, making it easier to see the most recent Reminders that have been added. Instead, I am presented with hundreds of ancient Reminders – despite having been marked as completed repeatedly, yet they still remain in the Reminders app – but to be clear this is actually a longstanding issue with Reminders itself and not the Reminders MenuBar utility.

In the above screenshot example, the Reminders app is surfacing reminders that were added via Siri from a decade ago, which again is just a curious longstanding artifact of the Reminders app itself and not this particular app. If you have tons of ancient reminders that never were successfully marked as completed and removed, as many of us do, then you might experience this too.

Thanks to 512pixels for pointing out this handy little tool!