Calendar & Reminders Sync

Turning it on (Pro)

Sync lives under Settings → Calendar & Reminders, and it is a Pro feature.

Each service asks one question before it does anything, and it is a different question for each, because they work differently.

Your calendar: Show Only or Show & Add

Nothing is imported from your calendar. Your events are read as you look at them and drawn in Today; no copy is kept. So the only thing left to decide is whether Set writes to your calendar.

Show Only draws your events in Today and never writes to your calendar. Nothing is added, edited, moved or deleted by a sync, however you rearrange your tasks.
Show & Add does that too, and puts your own tasks there as events, on whichever calendar you choose under Add events to.

The one exception is you. Editing or deleting an event from its own card is a deliberate action, so it reaches your calendar in either mode. Show Only is a promise about what Set does on its own, not a read-only lock.

Your reminders: Import Only or Two-Way

Reminders genuinely runs both ways, because a reminder becomes a task in Set.

Import Only reads your reminders and never writes back.
Two-Way keeps both sides matched: your edits, completions and deletions in Set go back to Reminders.

Set compares each field before writing, so a reminder you have not changed is left alone. It is a value comparison rather than a record of what you touched, so if Set gives an imported reminder something it lacked, such as a start time for a date-only reminder it scheduled into your day, that does get written back.

Your calendar events are not tasks

This is the biggest change in how Set works with your calendar, and it is worth being clear about.

Calendar events from the calendars you choose appear in Today as their own rows, slotted into the timeline at their real times. They are never imported as tasks. They never land in your Inbox, they never appear in a project, and they cannot turn into duplicates.

What that means day to day:

Reschedule fits your tasks around them. Press Reschedule and your tasks fill the gaps between your meetings. The meetings do not move.
Dragging a task steps around them too. A task will not land on top of a two o’clock call.
Nothing you do to a task can change an event. Completing, deleting, rescheduling and reordering tasks never move, rewrite or delete anything in your calendar.

Editing an event

Tap an event in Today and it opens like a task card: change its title, start time, duration and notes, and the change is written straight to your calendar. Moving an event reflows your tasks around its new time.

Repeating events say so, and ask whether an edit applies to that one occurrence or to all future ones. Changing a whole series asks for confirmation first, because it rewrites dates you are not looking at.

Turning one into a task

For the meeting you want to time, break into subtasks or tick off yourself, long-press an event and choose Convert to Task.

The event is claimed rather than copied. The new task takes the event over, so its row disappears and you are never left holding both, and nothing new is created in your calendar. With Show & Add on, the event moves onto your Set calendar like any other task’s event. In Show Only it stays exactly where it is, since that mode never writes.

The task keeps the meeting’s time and is locked to it, so rescheduling flows the rest of your day around it. Tap the lock to free it. Repeating events cannot be converted, because one task cannot stand in for a whole series.

Clearing events out of the way

Swipe a finished event to clear it, the same gesture that logs a completed task. It comes back tomorrow.
Clear Finished Events in Settings does it for you: as they end, or 1, 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes or an hour afterwards, so a meeting that overruns stays on screen while it does.
Also clear when Set opens sweeps finished events away each time you come back, so a day left open overnight is not still showing yesterday afternoon.
Reschedule clears everything already past, since replanning from now means the morning is behind you.
Skip an event that is not happening, or that finished early, and its slot is freed: your tasks move up into the reclaimed time, and Undo puts it back.
Delete an event from its card, behind a confirmation, with this-event or all-future-events for repeats.

Reminders

Reminders from the lists you choose become tasks in Set, because a reminder and a task are the same kind of thing.

Import lists as projects turns each Reminders list into a project of the same name, coloured with the nearest swatch from Set’s palette. Your account’s default list is left out on purpose, because it holds everything and a project of that name would be no better than the Inbox. Turning it on also files reminders already sitting in your Inbox.
Create a list per project does the reverse, in Two-Way only: each project gets a Reminders list of the same name, and its tasks’ reminders are written there rather than into one shared list. Renaming the project renames the list.
Ticking a reminder off in Apple Reminders completes the task in Set on the next sync, with full stats credit.
A None priority means unprioritised reminders stay unprioritised on both sides, rather than arriving as Low.

Reminders has no concept of subtasks, so subtasks stay in Set. They travel along inside the reminder’s notes so nothing is lost.

Deleting a project

Deleting a project can reach outside Set, so the confirmation says exactly how far it goes.

In Two-Way you get a choice: Delete Project & Reminders removes its Reminders list and everything in it, while Delete in Set Only leaves your reminders alone. In Import Only there is no destructive option at all.

Either way, that list stops being imported. Without this, the next sync would rebuild the project from the reminders left behind and it would come back from the dead.

Changed your mind? Settings → Reminder Lists has a Stopped Importing section with an Import Again button beside each one.

Where Set’s own events go

Under Add events to, choose where tasks created in Set get their calendar events:

A single Set calendar in your accent colour, which is the default
Priority calendars, one per priority level
Project calendars, one per project, in each project’s colour
Any calendar you pick

Imported events always stay on their own calendars. Changing the destination moves your existing Set events over on the next sync.

Across your devices

Your sync settings match on every device signed into the same iCloud account, so an iPhone and a Mac can no longer disagree about what your account does. Which calendars and lists you have selected travels too, matched by name so each device resolves them against its own accounts.

If a device has sync switched on but has never been granted permission, Settings shows an access needed on this device row with a Grant Access button.

When sync runs

Sync runs when you open the app, when it goes to the background, and whenever you pull down to refresh. Today’s reminders land first so the screen you are looking at settles quickly, then everything else follows in the background.

The whole engine runs off the main thread and works in batches, so connecting an account with thousands of reminders no longer holds up launch.