Things 3: Hacking my way to TZ aware reminders

Summary

I ran across this question posted in the r/thingsapp subreddit. The crux of the question was how to handle the case where you set your reminder for a task in Things 3 in one timezone, but need it to be TZ aware in your new Timezone.

Solution

I’ve created a shortcut that you can use that will make your reminders TZ aware.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/ec2fbfaee0ef4d36a604521c3256c412

Instructions: Run the shortcut whenever you add a reminder to a task (or simply schedule it to run every minutes / hours). That's it!

What the shortcut does (you don’t need to know this):

1. It will find all todos that have ‘reminders’
2. For each todo it will:
   1. if it has a checklist item starting with TZ: it will grab that value and set the reminder based on the time/timezone in the checklist
   2. if no checklist item exists, it will create one for the next run.

Voila!

How you can test it out – Let’s say you’re in the PST timezone:

1. create a todo and add a reminder for.. say.. 6pm
2. Run the shortcut
3. Notice that there is now a ‘checklist’ item that says: TZ: 6:00:00 pm PST
4. Edit the checklist item to say TZ: 6:00:00 pm EST
5. Re-Run the shortcut

Notice that now your reminder time changed to Today: 3pm!