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This is an issue I've faced for such a long time on both macOS and iOS, though for the purpose of this question I'd like to focus on macOS as that is where, I hope, manually editing settings files might even be a possible solution to this problem.

If a calendar alert pops up on macOS, we're presented with some quite usable snooze options: 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 1 day, or 1 week:

Calendar snooze options

On the flip side, if a reminder alert pops up on macOS, one only has the option to snooze it for 5 minutes, 1 hour, or until tomorrow, with nothing in between. This has obvious implications: if there's something you want to do in 15 minutes or 30 minutes, you don't have that option. You can only push the reminder to 5 minutes over and over, or push it a whole hour and risk not getting to it in time:

Reminder snooze options

On iOS, its even worse. If a reminder pops up, a user can only choose between "mark as completed", "remind me in 1 hour", or "remind me tomorrow" with a hard press on the iPhone 7.

I feel like Apple has decided that a reminder is for something to be done NOW (or in 5 minutes max) and doesn't want people postponing reminders in, say, 15 minute increments. If anything, it's Calendar time slots that might be marginally more immediate and fixed in time than reminders, aren't they? I think it's crazy to only have a choice between 5 minutes and a full hour to postpone our reminders, while being forced to go into the reminders app to manually change the time for each alert!

I've read through prior posts on here and other forums, skirting this topic, but there doesn't seem to be a conclusive answer.

Is there any way to manually edit the native list of reminder postponement duration options to at least match the calendar snooze options, or are we totally out of luck save for downloading software such as Snoozemaster which doesn't natively sort the problem, or having to specify a reminder snooze time via Siri (difficult in a quiet office environment)?

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    You should submit your opinions to Apple Feedback. Also, is rescheduling the alarm out of the realm of possibility?
    – Allan
    Aug 16, 2017 at 16:58
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    I totally agree with this sentiment. Plus, when you push things back by one hour for a few hours then ultimately push "remind me tomorrow" it seems to remind you the next day at the time you pushed it NOT at the time you had originally scheduled it to be. So if you had to do something in the morning, delayed it hour-by-hour until the end of the day, and then said "remind me tomorrow" it would remind you the next day at the end of the day - not the morning when you had originally wanted to be reminded! This is totally nuts and needs to be fixed. Feb 9, 2018 at 3:54
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    I created a macro that fixes this -- it lets you snooze a reminder for any amount of time. See forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/… Jul 3, 2020 at 23:33
  • And now in Big Sur they completely removed the snooze options May 30, 2021 at 8:18

1 Answer 1

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Those notifications are managed by the Notification Center App Extension inside of Reminders.app: /Applications/Reminders.app/Contents/PlugIns/com.apple.RemindersNC.appex and displayed by Notification Center. Sadly none of the information used to create the window is editable by the user.

Interestingly, there were more options when this feature was introduced in Mavericks. http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2013/11/change-the-snooze-time-of-a-reminder.html

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As of macOS 12 Monterey the Reminder options are:

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  • I bet that these values are hidden in a plist file somewhere so we should be able to reconfigure them. Only if an Apple engineer would ever read this....
    – sorin
    Dec 13, 2018 at 11:05
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    @sorin they're not. I'm a former Apple engineer Dec 13, 2018 at 11:16
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    I did use the Feedback Ass(istant) to create a bug report on Reminders and pointing them to this page for details. Everyone reading this page should do the same, this is one of the few ways to make them fix it. 2nd option is to retweet about it on it.
    – sorin
    Dec 13, 2018 at 12:40
  • Have more-recent OSes solved this? I'm running iOS 14.x and macOS 10.5.x, so I'm behind the "latest." Feb 12, 2022 at 23:25
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    @MattSephton - right, makes total sense. Alas, this falls into my "mismanagement" label. I've had these sorts conversations with product-mgrs, engineers, VPs, etc many times in past scenarios. Often (almost always) the debates can be solved with "make the default view/thing easy/clean, and provide configurable options for more-advanced users." This is the easiest-implementation example of "provide configurable options" I can remember--it's just a list of snooze times! Further: iOS/iPadOS has effectively the same problems. In the end: managagement has to care. They don't, or do not seem to. Feb 14, 2022 at 18:33

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