Reminders and your calendar
Repeating reminders
A reminder can repeat hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, on the days of the week you pick, or on a custom schedule like every 2 weeks or the last Friday of the month.
Why you'd care
One repeating reminder replaces forty individual ones, and more importantly it replaces remembering to create them.
The 60-second version
Set a reminder, then choose how often it repeats. Pick Custom for anything the presets do not cover. Set Ends to a date if it should stop.
The intervals
Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Weekly lets you pick the days, which is what you want for "every weekday" or "Mondays and Thursdays".
Custom repeats
Pick Custom in the repeat options when the presets are not quite right.
Frequency and how many. Choose hours, days, weeks, months or years, then type how many of them come between each repeat. A few that people reach for:
- Every 2 weeks, for a fortnightly bin day or payday.
- Every 3 months, for a quarterly review or a filter change.
- Every 6 hours, for medicine.
- Every 2 years, for a passport check or a license renewal.
On a pattern instead of a date. With months or years, the On the exact date switch decides how it lands. Leave it on and the reminder repeats on the same date each time, like the 14th. Turn it off and pick a pattern instead: the first, second, third, fourth, fifth or last, followed by a weekday, any weekday, a weekend day or any day. A monthly pattern counts within each month, and a yearly one counts within the whole year. A month without a fifth Friday simply skips that repeat.
Patterns are what you want when the date moves but the rule does not:
- The first Monday of every month.
- The last Friday of every month, for an end-of-month wrap-up.
- The last day of every month, which lands on the 28th, 30th or 31st as needed.
- The first Monday of the year, for planning the year ahead.
When it ends
The Ends row under the repeat decides when the repeat stops. It starts on Never. Pick a date and the repeats stop there, so "every weekday until the end of term" is one reminder rather than a standing commitment.
This is not the same as the reminder's end time. An end time (or end date) gives one occurrence a duration, like an event that runs from 2 to 3. Ends is about the series: the day the repeating stops.
This is worth using more than people do. A repeat with no end runs forever, and forever-running reminders are the main reason people start ignoring notifications.
Where to set it
Repeat is not a separate feature with its own screen. It is a row inside the reminder itself: set or open a reminder on a thing, and pick how often it repeats. See set a reminder.
That is why a repeat always belongs to one thing. There is no standalone recurring rule floating free of the thing it is about.
Going further
Repeats and instances. Completing one occurrence does not cancel the series. The next one arrives as scheduled.
Yearly repeats are for birthdays. Anniversaries and renewals are the best use of the yearly interval, and imported birthdays create exactly this.
Repeating reminder or a list that resets itself? A reminder interrupts you. A list that resets is there when you go looking. For habits, the list is usually better and quieter. See auto reset.
Tips
- Give every repeat an Ends date, even a generous one. You can always extend it, and it forces a review.
- If a repeating reminder is being dismissed unread every time, delete it. It has stopped working.
If it's not working
The repeat stopped. It reached its Ends date. Open the reminder and move that date later, or clear it to repeat forever.
It fires on the wrong day. Check which days a weekly repeat has selected, or the pattern a custom one follows, and whether weeks start on Monday in your settings.