Apple Shortcuts → Obsidian
Reminders → Obsidian
Apple Reminders is great for quick capture. Obsidian is great for long-term thinking. This shortcut bridges the two — pulling reminders out nightly and filing them into the right markdown files, tagged and dated.
The problem
Stray thoughts pile up. You jot something down in Reminders because it's the fastest thing you can reach — in the shower, on a walk, mid-conversation — but then it just sits there. Notes app feels heavy for quick capture, and there's no tagging. I wanted something that lets me dump thoughts fast and have them show up in my Obsidian vault, organized, without any extra effort.
How it works
A scheduled shortcut runs every night. It pulls unflagged reminders from your chosen lists, reads the notes field for hashtags, and routes each entry to the matching Obsidian file. Each thought gets formatted as a dated blockquote and appended via Advanced URI. Once synced, the reminder is flagged so it's never processed twice.
Hashtag routing
The key idea: hashtags in the reminder's notes field determine where it ends up. No hashtag? It goes to a default file. Add #ideas and it lands in ideas.md. New category? Just start using a new tag — no shortcut edits needed.
| Reminder list | Hashtag | Destination |
|---|---|---|
| Quick thoughts | none | inbox.md |
| Quick thoughts | #ideas | ideas.md |
| Quick thoughts | #questions | questions.md |
What ends up in Obsidian
### March 14, 2026
look into whether there's a way to automate plant watering reminders based on soil moisture sensors
### March 12, 2026
that podcast episode on decision fatigue — revisit before the quarterly review
The details
Dedup is handled through flagging — once a reminder is synced, it gets flagged. Next run, only unflagged and uncompleted items are picked up. Simple, visual, and no database needed.
Like the skincare log, this uses the Advanced URI plugin to write into Obsidian. The whole thing runs silently — you just get a notification telling you how many items were synced. Most of the time you forget it's even there, which is the whole point.
If you're someone who likes the clean, minimal UI of Apple Reminders for capture but wants the depth and flexibility of Obsidian for organization, this is the glue between the two.