Apple Notes, Reminders & Calendar: The ONLY Productivity System You Need

I've tested hundreds of productivity apps at this point. Notion, Todoist, Asana, Habitify, Google Calendar, you name it, I've probably tried it. But here's what's interesting. I keep coming back to three apps that were already sitting on my iPhone the day I bought it. Apple Notes, Reminders, and Calendar. And I'm not alone in this. I see this pattern constantly. People chase the newest productivity app, they spend hours setting it up, and then six months later, they're back to the basics. And I'm not alone in this. I see this pattern constantly. People chasing the newest productivity app, spend hours setting it up, and then six months later, they're back to the basics. And I think the reason is twofold. We tend to have kind of shiny object syndrome or shiny app syndrome, where we see a new app, it has all these cool features that in theory should save us time, and so we download it and we test it out. But the reason I keep coming back to Apple's productivity system is because I call it Apple's productivity triangle. It's genuinely genius. Apple built these three apps to work together as a system, not as separate tools. And when you actually use them properly, they create this kind of productivity web that a lot of people completely overlook. So in this video, I'll show you exactly how I use Notes, Reminders, and Calendar together to streamline my daily workflow. And I explain why this completely free system works better than most of the paid productivity apps people spend money on. My task list is hands down the most used app on my phone. I open it at least 10 times a day, and it still surprises me how many people don't use a task list at all. I'm like, how are you even getting things done? How do you remember everything? So I started using the tasks list maybe 11 years ago at this point, and I feel like it's one of those things where once you start doing it, you can't go back. Reminders integrate seamlessly with, as you'd expect, iPhone, MacBook, Apple Watch, pretty much every Apple product. But it does a few things that most task apps don't do nearly as well. So the location-based reminders, for example, when I pull up to the gym, my workout plan automatically can pop up showing me exactly what exercises I need to do. The sets, the weights, everything. I don't have to remember to check it. Same thing when I arrive at the supermarket, my grocery list just appears. The smart lists feature is genuinely clever. Instead of manually organizing tasks into categories, Reminders does it automatically. So I have a smart list called high priority work that collects any task I've tagged with work and marked as high priority. I can be anywhere in the app, add a task, and it shows up exactly where I need it. But the natural language processing, or basically just talking into the app, is what really saves time. I can just say to the app, remind me to go swimming every Sunday. Or remind me to send a specific email tomorrow morning. And the app gets it. It creates the reminder with all the right settings without having to either type it in manually or clicking through a lot of menus. For shared tasks, the collaboration feature works really well. You can share grocery lists with your household. You can share home maintenance tasks, project ideas. And when anyone checks something off, it updates instantly. So you don't get, I don't know, two people in your household buying milk on the same day, and wasting money and wasting time. One feature I like is tags to create a simple kind of a getting things done system. So I tag tasks with at home, at computer, at errands. So when I'm at my computer, I can instantly see all my at computer tasks across different projects. It's very simple, but incredibly effective for staying focused on what I can actually do right now. The other thing that makes Reminders powerful is how it connects to Calendar. So when I set a due date on a reminder, it shows up in my Calendar view. So I can see both my scheduled meeting and my task deadlines in one place. Now that integration alone saves me from double booking myself on missing deadlines. Something I haven't really talked about in this channel is how much of my workday actually happens in my inbox on my MacBook, right? So email is actually where a lot of the revenue from the business starts from, with prospects inquiring specifically. So that's why as a business operator, it's important I treat my inbox like a high performance system, not just a place where emails pile up. And that's why I've been using Superhuman Mail literally every single day for the last, I think, two years now. I moved from Google's Gmail to Superhuman in 2023. Honestly, one of the best decisions because before email was a constant drag, digging through email threads, rewriting similar messages over and over, losing track of follow-ups specifically. But ultimately, this whole inefficiency in following up with prospects, I was missing paid opportunities. It was literally losing me money every month. So Superhuman Mail is built specifically for people like me who basically live in their inbox and it's just faster. I'm not constantly reaching for my mouse. The focus design cuts out all the clutter and the AI actually writes in my voice, which is a big difference. It's not kind of a generic robot response. I use it to draft replies, summarize long back and forth threads and clear my inbox way quicker than I could before. So I partnered up with Superhuman for this video because this month they rolled out something called Superhuman Year and it's basically a year in review for your inbox. So I got a private stat card showing how many emails I sent and received, how often I hit inbox zero, how often the AI helped me write and how much faster my replies were compared to a typical inbox setup. It's kind of crazy to see my email habits as actual data instead of just guessing. They set up a specific link for this channel where you get your first two months of Superhuman Mail for free and you can go into next year with better habits. And if you stick with it, next December, you'll get your own year in review stat card showing how much time you actually saved. The link is in the description below. Okay, so I've talked about my task list. Now my calendar. So my calendar runs my day. So this is Apple Calendar and that's why I call it my personal assistant. There's no way I'd remember everything I have going on, but I don't have to. Calendar reminds me 15 minutes before every meeting, which makes me a much more reliable person because I'm not having to remember every single call, appointment, lunch meetup that I have and our brains, our memories rather, are very inefficient. We will always be forgetting things. And so if we have a system so we don't have to even remember them, then even better. So I'll give you an example. When we have a new hire who's less experienced and they miss a meeting or they show up late and one of the first things I ask is, are you using a calendar? Because without mine, I'd also be forgetting most of my meetings. I keep my calendar color coded. So yellow for personal business meetings, gray for meetings related to another business I'm running. The color coding helps me know within a split second what type of meeting it is just by glancing my calendar. It sounds very basic, but that visual clarity matters when you're looking at a very packed week. One feature most people don't use, but I feel should, is custom alerts. So instead of just the default 15 minute warning, you can set different alert patterns for different events. So for flights, you can set three alerts. One the day before to remind you to pack, one four hours before to remind you to start heading to the airport, and one, let's say, 45 minutes before the plane leaves to go to the boarding gate. For recurring meetings, I might only want a five minute heads up since they're routine. The natural language input, so just talking into your phone, saves a lot of time as well. Instead of clicking through date pickers and time selectors, I just, for example, can say, lunch with John next Tuesday at noon, or team meeting every other Thursday at 3 p.m. And calendar understands exactly what I mean, especially useful when you're adding multiple events quickly. Calendar also integrates with reminders in a way that is genuinely useful and you can kind of tell that it's the same company that created them both. So when I create a reminder with a due date, it appears in my calendar view. So I'm not just seeing my scheduled meetings, I'm seeing my task deadlines too. And this kind of just prevents me from scheduling a three-hour meeting block on a day when I have a major project deadline. And as you'd expect, Apple Calendar syncs perfectly with Apple Notes, which is the third piece of this system. Apple Notes is easily my number one note-taking app above every single note-taking app that I've used. I've seen this pattern over and over again. People start with Apple Notes, they get tempted by more complex apps with more bells and whistles like Notion, Obsidian, then eventually come back to Apple Notes. I know this because I've done it a few times over the last 10 years or so. And there are two things that keep me coming back to Apple Notes. First is the simplicity and second is the speed. So I don't want to wait for some heavy app to load or navigate through a complex interface. I just want to get my notes quickly and that's why I've set up a hot corner on my map. So when I move my cursor to the top left, a small square appears, and I click it and my notes are open instantly. And this is really useful if I'm on a Zoom call and I just really quickly, while on the Zoom call, while talking to someone, need to open up my notes and type something very, very quickly. This is by far having a hot corner in one of the corners is one of the fastest ways to just get the notes open and start typing. You can set this up by going to system settings, desktop and dock, scroll down to hot corners and set quick notes to any corner you want. Everything in Apple Notes is searchable, the title, the content, even text within PDFs you've added. And that's why I don't really use folders that much. I just have one big list of notes because finding anything is so fast. I press command and space on my keyboard, I type what I'm looking for and it finds the exact note I need in seconds. The scan feature is underrated too. I can scan any document using my iPhone camera and it gets saved directly into Notes. This feature costs money in most other apps but it's free with Apple Notes. One of the best things about all of these three apps is that it's literally free. Like there's no paid tier, all functions, all features completely for free. Now you can't say that for the vast majority of other apps out there. And also because it's Apple app, everything syncs through iCloud so I can access my notes on my phone, my MacBook, iPad, even my Apple Watch. The collaboration features work well when you need them. I can share notes with my team and anyone else that needs access to them in real time. One workflow I use constantly is linking notes to calendar events. So when I create a calendar event for a meeting, I can add notes directly to that event. And then during the meeting, I open the event and take notes right there. And after the meeting, those notes are attached to the calendar entry so I can always find them by looking at my past meetings. It's a very simple feature but incredibly useful for keeping context. Apple Notes is about removing friction. So each app by itself works really well by itself. But when you combine them and use all three together, that's when you can take care of the synergy effect or the one plus one equals three effect. And this is what makes Apple's productivity triangle so powerful. So here's a real life example of how I use all three together. So when I start a new project, I can capture all the initial details in notes. So the brief, the ideas, reference materials, everything. And from there, I create specific tasks in reminders with deadlines that automatically appear in calendar. So I'm looking at one view that shows me both my schedule time and blocks and my task deadlines. And during project meetings, I open the calendar events and take notes directly in there. If we decide on action items, I can create reminders right from those notes. And then those reminders show up in my task list with the proper due dates, which also appear in my calendar. So everything flows together without me having to manually sync anything. Another example is when someone emails me a document I need to review. I can save it to notes. I can create a reminder to review it by a specific date. And that reminder appears in my calendar so I can block out time to actually do it. The whole process takes about 30 seconds. Then I can kind of trust that it's handled because these are native Apple apps. They integrate with iOS safety features. They get regular updates aligned with system updates and they benefit from Apple security standards. You're not dealing with third party apps that might, not necessarily always, might have different privacy policies or different kinds of security vulnerabilities. The invisible productivity web these three apps create means I spend less time managing my tools and more time actually getting things done. It's one of the biggest problems I see with apps like Notion is a big one actually because there are just so many customizable options, so many features, so many things you can do. Before you know it, you can spend more time maintaining your productivity system than actually doing the work you need to do. And that's exactly what makes these three apps so effective. They each do one relatively simple task but they do that task very, very well. And if you like this video, I've made a couple of other videos here and here where I talk about how you can use the Apple ecosystem to streamline your workflow and just get more done in your workday. You can click on these cards on the screen to watch those.