Default reminder time is always 23:00 — can it be changed?

Support
1

Hi,

Whenever I create a reminder with ⌘⇧R, the default reminder time is automatically set to 23:00.

I was wondering why 23:00 is used as the default. Is this intentional, or is it determined by some macOS/Agenda setting?

Also, is there a way to change the default time to something like 09:00?

For reference, I’m a Japanese user, but I use Agenda with the English UI.

I’m using Agenda on macOS.

I’ve attached a screenshot of the New Reminder dialog.

Thanks!

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2

This depends on your timezone i guess.
Mine is always 12:00.
So i think it is somewhere hardcoded

3

I have all-day reminders enabled by default in the Agenda calendar settings. When creating a reminder and converting it into a scheduled one, the app suggests the next full hour—for example, if I create a reminder at 15:11, Agenda suggests 16:15.
The time zone can also be set here without any issues.

4

Thank you very much.

Since 23:00 in my time zone (JST) corresponds to 09:00 PDT, I wonder if the default time is hardcoded based on the California time zone?

5

Yes, actually, I tried that approach before as well. I was bothered by the default time for scheduled reminders being such an odd time as 23:00, so I thought I might just use all-day reminders instead.

But somehow, it just didn’t feel right for me personally.

Thanks for the information!

6

Good question, and the answer is more mundane than the timezone theory, though I can see exactly why you landed on it.

It is not California time, and it is not your timezone. There is no fixed hour and no fixed timezone anywhere in that code. What happens is that when a reminder has no time of its own, and there is no date written in the paragraph text, Agenda works one out from the date the note is assigned to. An assigned date is a whole day, so it runs from midnight to midnight. The app then aims for a day before the end of that day, and if that moment has already passed it tries an hour before instead. For a note dated today, a day before is in the past, so you get an hour before the following midnight. That is your 23:00.

So 23:00 is not a chosen default. It is one hour before the end of the day the note sits on. That it happens to match 09:00 Pacific is coincidence. You can see the rule from the other side by dating a note a few days ahead, where the reminder is offered at midnight on the day before instead.

Martin, your 12:00 is a different route through the same code. If Agenda finds a date written in the text of the paragraph, it uses that instead, and a bare day with no time is read as noon.

Roms, the suggestion you get when switching an all-day reminder to a timed one is an hour from now, rounded to the nearest quarter of an hour, so at 14:10 it offers 15:15.

None of this is intended to be clever. The rule is meant to read as remind me shortly before this note is due, and for a note dated today it produces an hour that nobody actually wants. There is no setting to change it at the moment. Both of those are worth fixing. I will consider what we could do about it.

Thanks for reporting it, and for noticing that something was systematically odd rather than just living with it.

Drew