I cleaned up my Apple Reminders setup today in the hope of using it again, but I got frustrated with the lack of keyboard shortcuts for actions I will commonly use.

One missing shortcut is the ability to change the reminder’s underlying list when adding a reminder from a time-based view like “Today”.

Luckily, I found some workarounds. Here are two approaches.

1. Using the context menu via the keyboard

This method unfortunately still requires large number of steps, and is not a single shortcut, but it can be performed in full with the keyboard.

First, make sure a reminder/reminders are selected. While you’re in editing mode, you can press Esc and then ↓, for example.

Next, perform these shortcuts.

Ctrl+⏎  L  →  →  [type the first letter of your desired list]  ⏎

Explanation:

• Ctrl+⏎ opens the context menu of the selected reminders
• L jumps to the “List” entry
• → opens the entry
• → again opens the “iCloud” lists (you might have different list providers here, too)
• further selection menu with first letter(s) or arrows helps select the right list
• ⏎ confirms the selection and applies the change

2. Using app-specific keyboard shortcuts

Reminders provides app menu items for each of your lists in Edit > List. This can be leveraged by macOS’ default support for App Shortcuts to create a single keyboard shortcut for setting a reminder to a specific list. If you want to use this for multiple lists, you will need to create multiple shortcuts.

Here is an example setup. I also set shortcuts for changing the task priority, and unsetting a reminder’s deadline, since those were missing as well.

To avoid ambiguity, you should probably follow Apple’s docs and specify the menu items like Edit->List->iCloud->[your list], but using the action name alone worked in my case too.

I hope this helps! And I hope Apple will add a way to change the list while typing the reminder title, just like you can by type # to select tags.