How do I delete most of my reminders on the iPhone? [duplicate]

Question

Whenever I need to remember something (oil change, buy something for kids, do something, whatever), I fire up Siri and create a reminder for a specific date/time. I do this for both my personal and work life. This method has been very successful in organizing my life and not letting things fall through the cracks.

When the time comes, iPhone reminds of the task and I go and do it. However, now I have several thousand reminders and it now takes a while for the Reminders app to start. I'd like to delete most of the reminders since they have expired long ago.

However, I see no way to delete Reminders in bulk. I don't see a way to do it on the phone, nor do I see a way to do it in icloud.com.

Am I missing something simple? If not, is there another way to manage reminders?

Answer 1

I am not aware of any iOS or web app that will allow bulk deletion of iCloud reminders but that is something that presumably could be written.

The only mechanism I am aware of that will bulk delete reminders is the Automator app running on OS X.

Here is a screen shot of something that would find all reminders older than 20 days and delete them summarily.

You can see I searched for reminder and chose a task to select them and another to delete them. DO NOT RUN THIS unless you are prepared to lose all your reminders or test things on a second iCloud account.

For testing, I would add a second condition and watch the script run before letting it loose on a thousand reminders. I'd hate to be the one to find a bug in the time logic of the Find Reminders action by working on live data that's not backed up (and I don't know a good way to back up the reminder data and have it re-syced back to the cloud easily).