I’m a productivity nerd. I love finding new ways to automate and optimize my workflow. That’s why I use Apple Reminders: a free, simple, and powerful tool that lets me manage my tasks with ease.

But there was one thing that bothered me: I wanted to see my to-dos in my calendar. When I had an Android phone, I used Google Tasks, which had a cool feature that automatically synced my tasks with Google Calendar. But I didn’t want to use Google products because of privacy concerns.

So I decided to use Siri Shortcuts to solve this problem. Shortcuts is an amazing app that lets you create custom actions and automations for your iPhone or iPad. I created two automations that ran every day: one at the start of the day and one at the end of the day.

The first automation ran at 00:01 and fetched all my to-dos for the day from Reminders. Then it added them to a separate calendar called “Tasks”. This way, I could see all the tasks I had planned for the day in my calendar app. The GIF below shows how it looks when I toggle the “Tasks” calendar on and off.

Pretty neat, right? But what about the tasks that popped up during the day? Well, for that, I created another automation that ran at 23:59 and scanned all the Reminders that I completed that day. If they were not already in the calendar, it added them to the “Tasks” calendar. This way, I could see all the tasks I accomplished that day in my calendar app. This helped me review my progress and plan better for the next day.

And as a bonus, I also added my calendar events to Reminders, so they would show up in my “Tasks” list as well. Because meetings are also part of the work I do.

So that’s how I hacked Siri Shortcuts to boost my productivity and track my to-dos. If you want to try it yourself, you can send me a "Hi" at hello@panchamkhaitan.com, and I will send you those Shortcuts for free!