Deleting Completed Items from Reminders Using Shortcuts

I’ve always been slightly annoyed that iOS Reminder has no way to purge completed items.
Well, not unless you are willing to sit there swiping to delete each item one by one. Like an animal. 😜

After seeing my “Completed Items” reach a couple of hundreds, I decided to turn to Google to see if anyone else has come up with a solution.

The results were quite disheartening. It seems that some people are just deleting the whole list and starting from scratch.

However, I did find a Six Colors article that provided instructions on how you could bulk delete completed items from iCloud’s version of Reminders. It also made mention of an AppleScript written by Dr. Drang that, when run, would delete completed items older than 30 days.

These were all well and good, but I wanted something to run automatically every month. Or at the very least sent me a reminder to run the script.
I was thinking about setting a Due Item, or maybe even setting up a cronjob… but then I remembered the Shortcuts app.

Maybe I could create a Shortcut workflow that could find and delete completed reminder items older than 30 days?

Well, apparently I can.

Click to enlarge

It’s a very simple shortcut workflow actually:

I specify all the lists that I would like to have purged – there may be some lists that you don’t want to have all the item deleted without first reviewing them. When you install the script, Shortcuts would ask you to input your own list names.

Here I specify that items completed over 30 days ago are eligible for deletion. Change this if according to your own preferences.

Then for each of the lists specified above, the filter would find items completed older than 30 days…

and remove them.

When you run the script, Shortcut would ask you three times if you are sure you want to remove the reminders, telling you that this is a permanent action. Just click “Remove” each time and presto, the items are gone.

Now, earlier on I mentioned that I want to automate this. There’s no way for Shortcut scripts to be run automatically on a schedule, but you can create a Launch Centre Pro item set to run monthly and have it run this Shortcut script. So every month a notification would pop up, you click on it, and the Shortcut script would go about removing all the old Reminder items.

If you have your own way of removing old Reminder items leave me a comment or send me an email, I’d love to know how others solve this problem.

So the link to the Shortcut script again: Deleting Old Completed Reminders Items