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Time zone support for reminders?

I notice even with time zone support on, there is no view in different time zone or "floating" time zone settings like in the calendar.


I would like to have my reminders times not adjust when I go from Tokyo to St. Louis on Friday. But I don't won't to keep my computer on Tokyo time. Any way of dealing with that?


Thanks,


Doug

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), i5, 512 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM

Posted on May 28, 2014 5:12 PM

Reply
5 replies

May 18, 2016 5:14 PM in response to Doug Lerner2

I realize that you asked this a while ago, but I found a solution (which has worked for me so far) and want to share it with you and anyone else who finds this thread.


The Reminders app doesn't have any visible settings for timezones, but it does understand them. If you export the items on a Mac, edit them to have "floating" times, and import them back into Reminders, they'll update to reflect the changes. Here's a step-by-step walkthrough:


  1. Drag the todo (or todos: you can select more than one) out of Reminders and into the Finder.

    User uploaded file

  2. Important: make a copy of this file. If anything goes wrong, you can drag the copy to Reminders in the Dock to get your original reminders back.

  3. Open the

    .ics
    file in TextEdit (or another plain text editor).

    User uploaded file

  4. You'll need to change three lines in the file. If you exported multiple todos, change them for each todo (they'll be one after the other). First, find a line that begins with

    DTSTART
    and looks like the time of your reminder. There may be other
    DTSTART
    lines near the beginning of the file — they're part of a description of your timezone, and they'll generally be dates in the past — which you can ignore. The correct line should look something like this:

    DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Rome:20160519T100000

    Erase everything from the semicolon up to (not including) the colon to make the line looks like this:

    DTSTART:20160519T100000

    Repeat the same change for the line beginning with

    DUE
    . Change this:

    DUE;TZID=Europe/Rome:20160519T100000

    To this:

    DUE:20160519T100000

    Finally, find the line beginning with

    TRIGGER
    :

    TRIGGER;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20160519T080000Z

    This represents the time that you'll actually receive a notification about the item (just like a calendar event, the notification is allowed to be before or after the actual "due" time). This line looks different from the others because alarm trigger times are required (by the iCalendar standard, which Calendar and Reminders both use to represent events) to be in the UTC (also known as "zulu") time zone, which is just represented by the

    Z
    at the end of the line.


    Don't worry about the above paragraph, and replace the absolute

    TRIGGER
    time with a reference to the reminder's start time. Change the line to this:

    TRIGGER:PT0M

    If you're in an adventurous mood, you can play with this value to set when you'll be reminded. For example, a value of

    PT-1H
    will remind you one hour before the time on the reminder, and
    PT10S
    will remind you ten seconds after.


    Make the three changes (per reminder), and save the file.

    User uploaded file

  5. Delete all of the items you just modified from the Reminders app. This is critical: on my machine, if I don't delete them before I re-add them from the file, Reminders keeps the old timezone.

  6. Open the modified .ics file with Reminders (either by dragging the file onto its Dock icon, or by right clicking and using Open With…).

    User uploaded file

  7. Finally (whew!), when Reminders asks, select the list you want the modified todo(s) to live in (normally the same list you exported them from), and click OK.

    User uploaded file

If you use iCloud, the updated reminders should sync to your other devices within a few seconds. If everything went well, your modified reminders should look the same! An easy way to test is to change your computer's timezone: if the reminder's time stays the same, it worked! You can make a fresh, untweaked reminder in the same list and compare how they behave when you switch timezones.


I wrote this answer while traveling and a little tired, so feel free to ask for any clarification or report problems. Hope it's helpful.

Time zone support for reminders?

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