Drag and Drop Emails and Notes to Create Linked Reminders
One of the lesser-known new iPhone tricks in iOS 15 is the ability to drag and drop items between multiple apps. We’ve already shown you how to do this with photos, but it works in many more places, and one of our favourites is the productivity-enhancing boost of linking up emails and notes into the Reminders app.
Apple added this form of “deep-linking” in the Reminders app several years ago, but until now, it’s only been available by opening an item like an email, and then calling up Siri and telling it to “Remember this.” This was a somewhat awkward way to do things, especially if you were in a quiet place and didn’t want to use your voice, and to make matters worse, it hasn’t always worked.
Two years ago, Apple partially addressed this in iPadOS 13, allowing you to drag and drop things like emails and notes directly into the Reminders app, where a new reminder would be created with an icon that linked back to the original item. It was actually even more useful there, since you could set up Reminders and Notes or Mail side-by-side to make things even quicker.
With iOS 15, however, this now works on the iPhone too, and even though it’s a bit more cumbersome, in our opinion it’s still far better than talking to Siri. Since you can’t set up multiple windows on an iPhone, the procedure requires a bit more in the way of finger gymnastics:
- Open Mail.
- Tap and hold and start dragging a message you want to create a reminder for.
- Once you start dragging, keep your finger on the message to hold it in place.
- Using another finger, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to return to the Home screen. Keep holding your original finger on the message.
- With the second finger, tap the Reminders icon to open the Reminders app.
- Move the first finger, which should still be holding the selected message, to an empty space in a Reminders list and let go.
- A new reminder will be created with the subject of the email. When you tap away from it to stop editing, you’ll see a blue Mail icon to the right. Tapping this will open the original message directly in the Mail app.
You can do the same thing with notes. Just follow the same steps above, starting from the Notes app instead of the Mail app. The title of the note will become the reminder, and a yellow Notes icon will link you back to the original note.
This also works in some third-party apps too. For example, the popular Things task management app will take dragged-and-dropped emails, adding a nice link back to the original email, complete with an envelope icon and the subject line. You can also drop notes into Things, although this only shared the text of the note, as Apple sadly doesn’t let third-party developers link directly into the Notes app.