Apple’s Reminders app has been a user-friendly app for years to help you remember important tasks and appointments. With a clean interface, you can quickly set reminders, create shopping lists, and organize tasks into handy lists.
Since iOS 26, the ease of use of the Reminders app has been further increased with a smart shortcut in the iPhone Control Center. This allows you to create a new reminder in seconds without opening the app. We explain how it works.
Shortcut for reminders
The Control Center for iPhone and iPad offers a variety of useful shortcuts to quickly manage or access tasks, apps, and settings. Since iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, you can also add a shortcut for Reminders. You would expect this to open the app of the same name, but that is not the case.
This shortcut opens a compact menu where you can directly enter a task and provide it with a date, location, flag, label, etc. This makes recording thoughts and tasks much more accessible and efficient, so you will almost never forget something the moment it occurs to you.
Add reminders slider
- Open the control panel
- Tap the plus button at the top of the screen
- Choose ‘Add a controller’
- Search for ‘Memories’
- Tap ‘New Reminder’ to add it
- Place the shortcut in a desired location
- Tap an empty space to confirm
Create reminder in control panel
Once you’ve added the controller, you can use it. Open Control Center and tap the shortcut to create a new reminder. When you tap the Reminders slider, a full app doesn’t appear, just a compact pop-up menu. This menu contains all the essential functions you need to create a complete reminder:
- Text input for your reminder
- Date selection for when you want to be reminded
- Location link for place-based memories
- Priority flag options
- List selection to place your reminder in the correct category
Controller in multiple places
You can not only add the new reminder control to the control panel, but use it in multiple places and link it to, for example, the action button or the shortcuts on the lock screen instead of the flashlight or camera.