Using Apple Notes Note in place of a Reminders note field - the Shortcut workaround

I recently switched from using Microsoft's To Do app to Apple Reminders. I have since found reasons [1] to doubt the wisdom of this choice, but I'm staying with it for now.

One of my frustrations is the Reminders note field.  It's only suited for 1-2 line notes and even those clutter up list display. (A better UI would truncate notes at one line, click reminder to see, etc. etc). I rely on notes to document work on a Reminder task.

So for anything longer than a 1-2 line note I'd prefer to use something like Apple Notes.app to hold a Reminder note.

Apple does support the use case of creating a Reminder about an already existing Note using the Share Sheet. It's a bit ugly but is said to more or less work on macOS and iOS. The Reminder will have a kind of link to the Note. But the use case is truly only for being reminded about a Note. For example, there's nothing in the Note to show it has an associated Reminder. 

A same workaround to this would be to just do it all manually. Create a Note, copy/paste the Note title into the Reminder note field. Put these kinds of Notes into a folder. This is 95% of the result with 10% of the effort.

An insane approach is to try to automate this. Which is what I did.

I had an extensive discussion with Sonnet about workarounds. It was a difficult discussion thanks to Apple's miserable documentation and the usual versioning/release confusions but after pounding on it, and reviewing and reinventing failed workarounds others have developed over years, we settled on an approach that uses Apple Shortcuts. A Perplexity search on found 4 instances of people redeveloping this same workaround; Fable and I did our own versions. (Why Fable?! [2]).

It works like this:

1. I'm working on a Reminder.
2. I run the Shortcut "CreateNoteLink". It creates a Note in my ReminderNotes folder from a plaintext template; then uses the Note timestamp as a unique identifier (key) in the title of the Note. It puts a URL on the clipboard that includes that timestamp as a search key.
3. I paste the clipboard contents into the Reminder URL field. I can now use the Notes.app Note instead of the native Reminder note field.

From the Reminder clicking on the URL opens the note. The URL is a shortcut:// URL that passes the timestamp key to the OpenLinkedNote Shortcut.  On both iOS and macOS this find the reminder-Note and opens it in Notes.app

If you want to try something like this below are the Shortcut Share Links (there's no way to share a bloody Shortcut other than by iCloud Link -- which are easy to break but we all hate Apple so we're not surprised). Or give the Fable build doc to an ai, give it control of Shortcuts, and let the ai build it.

CreateNoteLink: create the note and create the link stored in Reminder URL field (manual paste into reminder)

OpenLinkedNote: accepts a parameter from the Reminder URL and finds the correct note

The plaintext template (screenshot) - it lives in iCloud Shortcuts folder. I can edit this as I like. (Fable warned that trying to use a Notes based template was a recipe for more pain).

If you really want this and need some more advice you can email me at jgordon@kateva.org.

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[1] Subtask implementation is half-done. Search results do not allow navigation from result to a view that shows task/subtask. (Sadly Apple did it ok in Smart Lists, but clearly ran out of time to finish the work and, of course, never got back to it.) The calendar date picker was stolen from Windows 3.1. The Reminder notes field is awful. Too small, hard to read/type into, messes up display of tasks and lists.

[2] I used Fable because Opus couldn't deal with the sheer horror of Apple Shortcuts. There's no code to look at, it's only in iCloud or GUI screenshots. It's amazing Fable was able to guide me and it took a lot of screenshots and corrections. I was doing it wrong of course, I should have given Opus control over the macOS Shortcuts app so it could iterate there. As it was there were a lot of corrections needed including errors in Apple documentation and version changes.