I think it’s safe to say that I have not yet had enough coffee to keep me awake this morning. Because of that, this tip may turn out to be more normal than anything else I’ve ever written. Does that mean you guys are lucky today or unlucky? I don’t know. But I do know that I’m going to write about how to share reminders easily using iCal’s built-in commands. And if I go off the rails halfway through, you’ll know more coffee has been acquired.

First, open iCal and check to see if your reminders drawer is showing on the right side of the window. If it’s not, hit Option-Command-T to open it (or choose View > Show Reminders). When you do, you’ll see a list of all the things you should be taking care of but aren’t because you’re reading this tip.

If you want to send any of your reminders to someone else, you have a couple of ways you can go about it. As I mentioned in a previous tip, it’s pretty easy to just drag and drop an event (or a reminder in this case) onto Mail’s icon in your Dock to create a new message with the item’s information.

Drop your reminder on Mail…

…to create a text version of it in a new message.

However, iCal has a built-in method for sharing reminders that’ll even write your recipient a little note to go along with the included information. To use this feature, just right- or Control-click on the reminder you want to share and choose Mail Reminder.

After that, iCal will create a message for you, all nicely formatted with text to the recipient telling him to kindly get off his butt and do stuff. Also included will be an .ics file with a link that he can just click on to automatically add the data to his own reminders list. 

It really couldn’t be simpler. And for those of us with fuzzy-brain-no-coffee syndrome, that’s necessary.