Reminders app waking mac from sleep

For what it's worth, I had this same issue since I updated to Catalina in January. After trying almost everything on the forums, I had turned off all reminders and notifications but my computer still turned on twice a day and the exact same time. In my terminal, I followed someone else's advice and typed in this command:

pmset -g log | egrep '\b(Sleep|Wake|Start)\s{2,}

to see that it was in fact waking at those times

and then

pmset -g sched

to see that I did in fact have it scheduled to wake.

Something someone else wrote gave me the impression to check my iCloud account, which I rarely use. I logged in and lo and behold, I had 2 reminders that were in my iCloud that weren't on my phone reminders anymore. I deleted those 2 items and this morning was the first in months that my computer did not wake!

So, in addition to the list that Apple provides, I recommend checking your iCloud reminders or notifications because that is what was causing the problem for me.

I have the very same problem as so many others here.

What did work for me, setting an immutable flag to `/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist`:

$ sudo pmset sched cancelall
$ sudo chflags schg /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist

$ /bin/ls -lO com.apple.AutoWake.plist

This prevents the system from updating the file and my MacBook no longer wakes to reminder events. Needles to mention that it prevents all scheduled system events like sleep, power-on and such.

I recommend removing the flag before a system update:

$ sudo chflags noschg /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist

Hope this helps at least some of you!

OK, so here is a quick update after a week dealing with Apple Support trying to get to the bottom of this...

1. A Senior Advisor at Apple escalated my issue to their engineers who came back yesterday saying there is currently a sync issue with reminders, this may explain why various reminders do not complete or sync correctly across all of my devices.
2. One of my suggestions as to why I'm having so many problems with reminders I pointed out could be because I'm a heavy user and the shear number of reminders having to be synced may be causing an issue, especially as I have been using Reminders for years pretty much since it was released, and they've been ported from OS to OS including the most recent. significant upgrade at the end of 2019. When I looked, I had almost 20,000 completed reminders.
3. Apple's engineers said they didn't have the power to wipe my reminders remotely and that I was have to painful delete all 20,000 manually, a task I've been doing over the past week. I now have 0 reminders scheduled or completed in my iCloud.
4. Creating a new reminder with an alert time *no longer* wakes my iMac up from sleep (hurrah), however I am still experiencing significant syncing issues. Any new reminder I set on any of my devices (iMac, MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad or iCloud) fail to sync across any of my reminder apps, something is seriously wrong.
5. I have also noticed that despite my notifications being turned on on my iMac, none of them are working across any of my apps, which leads me to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with the notifications on my iMac and maybe it's not just a reminders issue.

To sum up, I'm none the wiser after 2 weeks of testing - without Apple or myself able to get my Reminders and notifications working I find myself seriously considering moving everything to the 'Microsoft To Do' app (formerly Wunderlist) which has raving reviews and seems to be working like a dream over the past week...

This zsh lines are just to stop wbc_drain task. I search thru process that match some criteria and force stop them.

if the following command does not display anything, you do not have the wbc_drain issue and what maintain you iMac awake is something else.

pmset -g assertions | grep wbc_drain

one easy way to see if you iMac slept is to use this command

% pmset -g log | grep 'Total Sleep/Wakes since boot'
Total Sleep/Wakes since boot at 2020-04-05 19:01:41 +0200 :35

here this computer sleep/wakes 35 times since its last boot.

annoter interesting diagnostic to do is

% pmset -g log | grep -w --color -e 'Entering Sleep' -e 'Wake Requests' -e 'Client Acks'

This display the sleep/wake sequences.

the sequence is

• Entering Sleep
• Wake Requests, this list all the future wake and who request it and when
• PM Client Acks, got do sleep
• Kernel Client Acks, kernel wake the computer due to the earliest wake Request

e.g.

pmset -g log | grep -w --color -e 'Entering Sleep' -e 'Wake Requests' -e 'Client Acks'
…
2020-04-06 11:42:42 +0200 Sleep               	Entering Sleep state due to 'Maintenance Sleep': Using AC (Charge:0%) 3205 secs 
2020-04-06 11:42:47 +0200 Wake Requests       	[*process=mDNSResponder request=Maintenance deltaSecs=3187 wakeAt=2020-04-06 12:35:54] [process=dasd request=SleepService deltaSecs=112052 wakeAt=2020-04-07 18:50:19 info="com.apple.dasd:0:com.apple.apsd.apprefresh,501:com.apple.mail.ApplicationRefresh"] [process=dasd request=TimerPlugin deltaSecs=19261 wakeAt=2020-04-06 17:03:48 info="com.apple.dasd:0:com.apple.coreduetd.people"] [process=powerd request=UserWake deltaSecs=11833 wakeAt=2020-04-06 15:00:00 info="com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.remindd.time-alarm,533"]           
2020-04-06 11:42:47 +0200 PM Client Acks      	Delays to Sleep notifications: [com.apple.apsd is slow(1003 ms)] [mDNSResponder is slow(5003 ms)]           
2020-04-06 12:35:55 +0200 Kernel Client Acks  	Delays to Sleep notifications: [powerd is slow(5006 ms)] [AppleDeviceManagementHIDEventService driver is slow(msg: WillChangeState to 2)(439 ms)] [en0 driver is slow(msg: WillChangeState to 0)(419 ms)] [AppleAHCIDiskQueueManager driver is slow(msg: SetState to 0)(904 ms)] [RP01 driver is slow(msg: SetState to 0)(1002 ms)]           
…

Here sleep was requested for 3205 secs @ 11:42:42

5 seconds later the Wake Request was made with earliest Wake at 12:35:54 for some maintenance task.

PM Client did enter in sleep

@12:35:55 Kernel did wake up the computer.

I did just find that turning off wifi before putting the Mac to sleep seemed to be a workaround that actually "works" for me. Had tried everything else I could find: do not disturb, turning off notifications etc. After turning off wifi and putting the Mac to sleep, I made several reminders on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch with various due dates/times or none at all. The Mac did not wake once. Have provided feedback at apple.com/feedback in hopes of a resolution. Fingers crossed.

It is normal if you have a Reminder that is visible to user that the Mac is awake for this reminder.

The log shows

com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.time-alarm

as the requester of the the wake.

Nothing strange.

I check in my logs I have no occurence of com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.time-alarm while I'm using Reminders app sync with iCloud.

Here his my advise to completely isolate things.

Add a volume to your disk, with APFS it is easy.

Install a fresh Catalina create an account, do not sync with any online service like iCloud dropbox messenger ..

See if it happens.

Obviously you have an instance of reminders app that seems to cause this.

Same issue here. I always had the entry "Scheduled By: com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.remindd.time-alarm" in System Information -> Power.

I tried everything like "When display is sleeping" on, "When screen is locked" on, Notification off by app, notification totally off, App-Nap off, pmset tcpkeepalive off, force deep sleep

This morning I scheduled DnD time from 0:00 - 23:59 and rebooted my Macbook. Now System Information doesn't show any wakeup events anymore for the first time.

Hey all, sorry for the troubles, I’ve had similar issues in the past, according to many posts here, this may coincide with “upgraded reminders”. A fact is that when upgrading reminders, it isn’t specific to one device, yet specific to your Apple ID/iCloud Account, once upgraded, you will need the newer software on ALL your devices for them to sync correctly, this is one of the related articles:

https://support.apple.com/guide/reminders/about-upgraded-reminders-remneacab208/mac

I don’t know if this is even related at all, but reading some replies, it might.

Just curious, for everyone experiencing this:

Of course your Mac is on Mac OS Catalina, but, for the other devices using your Apple ID, e.g. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, etc., are any one of those devices running an older operating system, or even an older version of the current OS for that device?

If even one of them is not, just wondering if the devices trying to access “upgraded reminders” from devices that can’t access “upgraded reminders” is causing a conflict with that particular device that is, or is not up to date.

I’d say if a clean install has the same result, that may be a factor. Although I haven’t read all the posts, (long one). Has anyone attempted to sign into a different Apple ID to see if it makes any difference? Thanks.

I'm having the same issue on macOS Catalina 10.15.3. Scheduled reminders from the Reminders app (synced between MacBook, iPhone and Watch via iCloud) cause my MacBook to wake up and activate the external monitor.

These are the things I have tried so far and which have not worked:

• Reset NVRAM
• Turn off Power Nap
• Turn on Do Not Disturb settings for "when the display is sleeping", "when display is locked" and "when mirroring to TVs/projectors"
• Turn Do Not Disturb on (master switch)
• Turn off notifications for Reminders altogether

The bug can be replicated easily on a clean install of Catalina:

1. Create a reminder in the Reminders app with a date and time (e.g. 10 minutes into the future)
2. Put your Mac to sleep
3. Your Mac will wake up at the designated time (even though you already got the notification through your iPhone or Apple Watch)

It doesn't respect any Do Not Disturb setting and it doesn't respect any notifications setting. Even turning notifications off completely on the Mac does not help.

I guess most people use their MacBooks without an external monitor and therefore never notice this bug. However, if you have an external monitor connected, it's easily noticeable and quite annoying as the monitor always gets turned on.

By the way, if you open a terminal window and enter pmset -g sched, you can see that these scheduled wakes are created by com.apple.alarm.user-visible-com.apple.remindd.time-alarm.

Unfortunately this setting ("Do not Disturb when the display is sleeping") does not have any effect in macOS Catalina. The machine still wakes up (and turns on the external monitor) whenever a reminder is scheduled.

I had this issue too and it was driving me crazy... none of the posted solutions worked (i.e. do-not-disturb all the time, etc.).

Here is what worked for me. I changed some other seemingly unrelated Notifications settings... removing sounds, badges, etc. for other applications. I suspect these changes forced the OS to 'refresh' the states of all of the Notifications. Coincidentally, I also disabled all notifications for Google Chrome. Now the issue has gone away completely. I hope this helps other folks.

iMac (Retina 5K, 27 pouces, 2019) 10.15.4 - fusion drive (apple built-in)

got it as well.

I have reproduce it on a completely clean install. I added a volume and did install Catalina on it and boot from it.

I did not install anything, just created an account, and an issue is there.

So this is definitively a Catalina issue (I never see on Mojave).

It is related to fusion drive, this does not happen on my MBP that has a SSD, a task will appear after some time or after the 1st sleep/wake sequence.

This task is started by apfsd that starts a user agent that starts com.apple.apfsd/wbc_drain that will never stop and prevent the sleep.

I'm wondering if Apple take care of this as you can find many people having the issue.

I find a workaround, not very clean but this is the only way out, and it will not persist across boot.

The workaround consist in killing this background task by killing the UserEventAgent that supports it.

It turns that it need to be killed several times as it restart

in zsh you can copy past this. This will hide the issue until reboot or may be after sometimes the OS will restart this endless task.

until [ -z $(ps -ef | grep UserEventAgent | grep System | awk '{print $2}') ]
do
ps -ef | grep UserEventAgent | grep System | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo kill -9
done

Ah so your Mini works correctly and doesn't do this? Are you sure? It is my Mini that is causing this and my MacBook Pro does too, but the lid is usually down when sleeping so I had never noticed. However when I checked, it was waking up. I also had a friend check his Mini and sure enough, any Reminder woke his Mac at that time.

If there are some Macs on which Catalina does not do that, apart from not being able to understand how that can be, I'd say it proves beyond doubt that it is a bug.

Please everyone, report this bug here: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html

We need to generate awareness of the issue if Apple is going to solve it. I know this is a very very common problem tons of people are having.

i did a

sudo pmset sched cancelall

after that it was removed permanently.