You have paid for four to-do apps, and the one already on your Mac has never had a fair week.
Apple Reminders came with the machine. It opens in a second, it takes a line from Siri while your hands are full of shopping, and it has never once asked you to build a system. We judged it against the seven things a to-do app needs for an ADHD brain, and it passed about half. Half, for nothing, is a good place to start.
So here is the setup we would give a friend with ADHD, in seven steps. After it, the four things Reminders cannot do, said plainly.
One list, a time on everything, one flag
The whole setup takes about ten minutes, and most of it is deleting.
- Make one list and call it Today. Reminders lets you have as many lists as you like. Have one. Every task you own goes in it. Old lists can stay where they are; you will not look at them, and nothing breaks. In Reminders settings, make Today the default list, so anything from Siri lands there.
- Put a time on every reminder, not only a date. Open the reminder, turn on Date, then turn on Time, and pick the hour you mean. "Friday" is a fact in a calendar. "4:00 PM" is a moment you can feel coming, and Reminders will say so on your screen at 4:00.
- Flag one thing as the day's big one. Tap the flag on one reminder. One. The Flagged smart list now holds a single row, and it is the day's boss. If a second thing feels big, it waits for tomorrow's flag.
- Give a big task its steps as subtasks. "Do my taxes" will not start. "Find last year's return" will. Drag a reminder onto another and it becomes a subtask, and you can tick the step without opening the whole job.
- Capture with Siri, in the moment. "Remind me to send the invoice at 4pm." The reminder lands in Today, with its time, before the thought is gone. Type nothing. Sort nothing.
- Look at the Today smart list, and only at it. Reminders builds a Today view for you: everything with today's date, in one place. Open it in the morning. The Scheduled smart list shows the week ahead; open it on Sunday and leave it alone on Tuesday.
- When you miss one, move it or delete it the same day. A missed reminder gets a new time or it leaves. Ten of them at the top of Today become a pile, and a red pile is the thing you stop opening.
No tags. No second list. No shared lists, no colour codes, no system. Reminders can do all of those, and every one is a decision between the thought and the list. For one month, the list is one list.
Why this shape and not a better one
Every rule above comes from two facts about the brain, and both have a source.
An ADHD brain does not start on importance. It starts on interest, novelty, challenge or urgency, in a model the psychiatrist William Dodson built from decades of adult patients. It is a clinical model, not a trial, so we say it plainly. Of the four, a to-do list can hand you one on demand: urgency. A time of day on a reminder is a small deadline. A flag makes one row different from the rest. One list gives the eye one place to go. Nothing in the setup asks you to care more. It changes the task's surroundings until the brain reads it as worth starting.
The second fact is about the head. With ADHD, it is hard to keep a list in your head. A 2013 meta-analysis of 38 studies found adults with ADHD score lower on working memory, the short store for a thought while you use it (Alderson and colleagues, 2013). This one is well supported. The thought you had on the stairs has seconds to live. Siri gets it into the phone before it fades, and one list means you never wonder which list it went to.
The four things Reminders cannot do
Reminders passes half our list, and the missing half has one shape: it leaves the sorting to you.
- Sort a dump into tasks. Reminders takes one clean line at a time. An ADHD head at 9 pm does not produce clean lines. It produces "dentist?? rent friday deck by 4 sam trip". Reminders will store it as one reminder with exactly those words. Someone still has to turn it into five tasks with five times, and the sorting is the work you cannot start. Here is why a dump has to go somewhere first.
- Show the time left instead of a date. Reminders shows "4:00 PM". It does not show "3h left", and "almost up" is the feeling this brain starts on. You do the subtraction yourself, all day, in a head with no spare room for it.
- Put one task in front of you. The Today list is a list. Twenty rows, one screen, no place to start. Nothing in Reminders will pick one, hide the rest and hand it to you.
- Say a task's name when it waits. A reminder speaks once, at its time, as a banner, and then it is a row again. Nothing notices "Send the invoice" has sat open since Tuesday and says so.
Those are the four things we built Kaapi to add. If Reminders is enough, it is enough.
How Kaapi does it
We built Kaapi to be the other half, not a replacement for the half Reminders already does.
You dump everything in one box, typed or spoken, and a model on your Mac turns it into small tasks with steps. Before we picked the model, we ran 17 on-device models on 38 hand-checked brain dumps: typed ones, rambles, vague ones, real voice transcripts, and six with no work in them at all. The one we ship takes about 4 seconds on a typed dump on a recent Mac, and nothing you write leaves the machine.
A time you wrote, "by 4pm" or "tmrw" or "the weekend", becomes a badge on the row: "3h left", then "1h 20m left" under three hours, filling and darkening in the last two. It never turns red. Past its time it says "Missed" in plain ink with a thin line, and the card asks: New time, Done already, or Let it go.
A Shuffle button blurs the page and leaves one task alone, with one button: Start focus. And Timi, a small pebble at the bottom right of your screen, says one line about a real open task every five minutes, settable up to sixty: Have you done "Send the invoice"? Never a banner. Kaapi is $9.99 a month or $99 a year, plus tax. You try the whole loop first, then you pay. Mac only.
Frequently asked questions
Is Apple Reminders good for ADHD?
Good enough to start with, and it costs nothing. It takes a line in a second, it puts a time on a reminder and speaks at the hour, and it never asks you to build a system. Keep one list, put a time on everything, flag one thing a day. It cannot sort a dump or show the time left.
How do I set up Apple Reminders for ADHD?
One list called Today, set as the default. A time of day on every reminder. One flag for the day's big one. Steps under a big task as subtasks. Capture with Siri. Open the Today smart list in the morning and the Scheduled list once a week. When you miss one, give it a new time or delete it.
Should I use tags or several lists in Reminders?
Not for the first month. Every list is a place a task can hide, and every tag is a decision before the thought is saved. One list and one flag give the eye one place to go. If the single list is too long to look at, the answer is fewer tasks in it, not more lists.
What does Kaapi add to Apple Reminders?
Four things. It sorts a dump of half sentences into tasks with steps, on your Mac. It shows the time left on each row, "3h left", and never turns red. A Shuffle button puts one task in front of you and blurs the rest. And Timi says a task's name when it has waited, in one small line, never a banner.
Sources
- Dodson, W. (updated 2025). How adults with ADHD think: Uncomfortable truths about the ADHD nervous system. ADDitude. additudemag.com/adhd-in-adults-nervous-system. A clinical model from practice, not a trial.
- Alderson, R. M., Kasper, L. J., Hudec, K. L., and Patros, C. H. G. (2013). Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and working memory in adults: A meta-analytic review. Neuropsychology, 27(3), 287–302. doi.org/10.1037/a0032371. A meta-analysis of 38 studies; well supported.