Early Reminder Notifications

One limitation of Reminders is that there’s never been an easy way to get advance notice of a task. You can set a date and time for a task, but that triggers the notification at the moment it comes due — not before. The workaround for this has always been a bit clumsy; set the task to be due a day or two in advance and then just move the date when the first reminder goes off.

With iOS 17, you’ll be able to set an “Early Reminder” for any task that has a due date. This can be anywhere from one minute to 200 months before the task is due, with some reasonable default options from 5 minutes to one month for quick selection.

If your task has a time set, the Early Reminder will trigger based on that time. So, for instance, a two-day Early Reminder for a task due at 2:00 p.m. on Friday would fire off a 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday. Tasks with only a date and no time will use the all-day reminder time from settings.