I kept forgetting my Apple Reminders existed, so I built them a dashboard

I'm not short of task apps. I'm short of looking at them.

Apple Reminders already does most of what I need. It syncs between my Mac and my iPhone, and Siri can add to it. But on the Mac it lives in its own window that I never open, so overdue tasks pile up quietly. My planning notes were in Apple Notes, my reminders were in Reminders, and my disk was slowly filling up somewhere in between.

The usual fix is another productivity app. That usually means another account, another cloud database and another place your tasks live. I didn't want my tasks split across two systems. I wanted the one I already had to be harder to ignore.

So I built Mac AI Productivity Hub: a native Mac app that sits on top of Apple Reminders and puts what matters in front of you.

What it does

• A dashboard with cards for open tasks, overdue tasks, tasks due today and free storage. A "Your next step" card points out the most urgent thing.
• Task views for All Open, Today, Overdue, Upcoming, No Due Date and Completed, sorted by due date and time.
• Add, edit, complete, search and snooze reminders, using Apple's own date and time picker, with quick buttons for Today, Tomorrow and Next Week.
• A menu-bar icon with live counts of open and overdue tasks. This is the part that actually fixed my problem. It's hard to ignore a red number you see all day.
• A floating Desktop Companion with your counts, your next task and quick actions.
• Natural-language entry. Type "call the dentist next tuesday at 3pm" and it becomes a proper reminder with a date and time.
• Two-way sync with Apple Notes. I can plan my week in a note, sync it into Reminders, and when I tick something off on my phone, the note gets marked done too.
• Mac Health and Review Cleanup. A plain-language report on free space, memory and swap, and a list of old screenshots, installers and caches you can choose to clear.

No new database, no account

The app doesn't store your tasks. It reads and writes them through Apple's EventKit framework, the same way the Reminders app does, using each reminder's own ID. So there's only ever one copy of your tasks.

That's what makes the iPhone side work for free. I add a task on my Mac, and it's on my phone a moment later through iCloud. I complete it on my phone, and the Mac dashboard updates. I didn't write any syncing code for that. Apple already had it.

The app itself makes no network calls.

Where the AI comes in

The AI features are optional, and they run through Apple Intelligence Shortcuts that you set up yourself in the Shortcuts app. That was a deliberate choice: you pick the model, and you can see exactly what the Shortcut does.

• Natural-language tasks go through a Shortcut that turns your sentence into a title, date and time. If you haven't set one up, a small parser built into the app handles common phrases instead.
• Today's Plan can ask a Shortcut to write you a short plan for the day from your open tasks. It asks before it sends your task titles anywhere. Without the Shortcut, you get a plain plan sorted by date.

The app works fully without AI. AI just makes some parts nicer.

The rule: nothing changes behind your back

This was the decision I cared about most, especially for the cleanup tools.

A lot of cleanup apps delete first and explain later. I wanted the opposite. Review Cleanup shows you what it found, with nothing ticked. You pick what goes, confirm a second time, and it goes to the Trash, not straight to permanent deletion. You can still change your mind.

The same rule applies to everything else:

• Background jobs only read. The scheduled check-ins and the daily storage scan look at your data but never change it.
• Anything that writes asks first. On the command line, commands that change something preview by default and need an explicit --apply flag.
• The Notes sync is careful in reverse. When it syncs back from Reminders to your note, the only change it can make is marking a task done. It can't rewrite or delete your notes.

What I learned

Build for the tools people actually have. I started the interface in SwiftUI, then rewrote it in AppKit. That way it builds with only Apple's Command Line Tools, so nobody needs a multi-gigabyte Xcode install just to try it. One script builds the app, signs it and installs it. I carried the same idea over to Toolbelt later.

Some guarantees aren't yours to make. The app won't create a second open reminder with the same title in the same list. But if you add the same task on your phone and your Mac at the same moment, both can get through before iCloud catches up. Duplicate protection reduces duplicates, but it can't fully prevent them across devices. So the docs say that plainly instead of promising something the app can't deliver.

Try it

It's open source. It needs an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later. The source and install steps are on GitHub: github.com/JeffreyEssien/mac-ai-productivity-hub

Stack: Swift, AppKit, EventKit, Python, AppleScript, launchd, Apple Shortcuts.

It's now the task manager I use every day, mostly because of that red number in the menu bar. Where do your tasks go to be forgotten?