Reminders on your iPhone provides a pretty basic way of staying on top of your to-dos. I certainly use it daily to keep tabs on household chores, and the app has also proven useful in reminding me when to cancel subscriptions before free trial periods run out or an auto-renewal kicks in.
As helpful as Reminders can be, though, the app lacks a sense of urgency. Notifications from Reminders will pop up on your iPhone, but with little fanfare. In fact, it's so easy to overlook a Reminder alert that for time-sensitive tasks — picking up my daughter at a certain time, say — I'll set an alarm in the Clock app to make sure I don't lose track of the time or the task at hand.
1. Create a to-do in Reminders
From within the Reminders app, create a new to-do by tapping the Plus button on the bottom right corner of the screen. Fill in the usual details such as the reminder's name as well as any other key details.
2. Mark the Reminder as Urgent
In the Date & Time field of your reminder, there's now an Urgent toggle. Slide it on, and you'll automatically activate a date and time for that alert to go out. By default, Reminders sets the current day and the next hour, but you can adjust both to your preference.
Note that when you designate a reminder as urgent, the alarm will sound even when you have a Focus mode turned on, as I do when I play games on my iPhone.
3. Respond to the alarm
When the time hits the one you've set, an alarm will sound, and a notification will appear. You can either turn off the alarm or snooze it, but in either case, a to-do's deadline won't escape your attention any more.
If I have a criticism of the Urgent feature, it's that there doesn't appear to be a way to trigger it when creating a reminder through Siri, my most common method of creating tasks in the Reminders app. I can say, "Hey Siri, remind me to take out the trash at 9 p.m." will create a to-do for that time in Reminders, but I'll have to manually edit the entry to turn on the Urgent toggle. Even adding something like "and mark it urgent" doesn't change anything with Siri at this point.
As you'll see by exploring our iOS 26 guide, this isn't the only change to the Reminders app. You can also use suggested reminders on Apple Intelligence-ready iPhones to pull relevant tasks from e-mails, notes and more and turn them into a list of to-dos.
Other iOS 26 features worth mastering include using the new Visual Intelligence features and screening texts from unknown senders in Messages.
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