I Used to Have 11 Reminders Set in Apple Reminders
Stand up. Drink water. Check the deploy. Review PRs before standup. Push my daily notes to Notion. Open Slack before the team call. None of these are hard tasks — they're just things I forget when I'm deep in something. So I'd pile them into Apple Reminders, where they'd sit until I swiped them away out of annoyance without actually doing the thing.
That workflow was broken. The reminders were dumb — they fired and disappeared. They didn't open anything, run anything, or talk to any of the tools I was already using. They were just noise.
LacPointer's Task Scheduler is the fix I didn't know to ask for.
What the Task Scheduler Actually Does
Open LacPointer with Option+Space, navigate to the Task Scheduler, and you can set up a task in about 20 seconds. Each task has three parts:
- What to do — a reminder message, an app to launch, or a system command to run
- When to do it — once, daily, weekdays only, weekly, or monthly
- What time — a specific clock time that triggers it
That's it. No XML, no crontab syntax, no Automator workflows that break every macOS update. You describe the task in plain English and pick a schedule from a dropdown.
Three Things I Actually Have Scheduled Right Now
1. Open Slack at 9:45 AM on Weekdays
Standup is at 10. I always forget to open Slack until someone pings me. Now LacPointer launches it automatically at 9:45, every weekday. I didn't have to write a shell script or build an Automator shortcut. I just told the scheduler "open Slack" and set it to weekdays at 9:45 AM.
2. A "Push Your Notes" Reminder at 5:30 PM Daily
I keep a running scratchpad of what I worked on throughout the day. The reminder pops up at 5:30 PM every day: "Push your notes to Notion." It's a message, not a command — just enough friction to make me actually do it before I close the laptop. Combined with LacPointer's Notion integration, I can act on it right from the bar without switching tabs.
3. A Weekly System Cleanup Command on Sundays
Every Sunday at noon, LacPointer runs a cleanup command that clears my Downloads folder of anything older than 30 days and empties the trash. This is the kind of task I'd been meaning to automate for two years. I finally did it in about a minute.
Why This Beats cron for Most People
I'm comfortable in a terminal. I know how cron works. But cron has real friction for anything that isn't a pure shell command — you need to think about environment variables, PATH issues, whether the GUI app will actually open or just silently fail because the display isn't set. And if you want to edit a cron job, you're back in crontab -e staring at a file with no labels on any of it.
The Task Scheduler lives where I already am. I open LacPointer for everything else — Notion tasks, calendar checks, GitHub queries — and the scheduler is just another tab in that same bar. Editing a task is point and click. Disabling one temporarily doesn't mean deleting it.
For system commands specifically, it also handles the macOS permission surface correctly because it's already running as a trusted accessibility app. That's one fewer headache compared to hand-rolling an Automator service.
One-Time Tasks Are Underrated Too
The scheduler supports "once" as a frequency, which makes it useful as a smarter alarm. Say you're in a deep work block and you want a reminder in exactly 90 minutes to take a break and check your email. You can set a one-time task right from LacPointer, timed to the minute, and it fires once and disappears. No recurring clutter.
I use this a lot during long builds or test runs — "remind me in 45 minutes to check if the CI passed" is faster to set in LacPointer than it is to set a timer on my phone, and it shows up in context, not as a random buzz from a different device.
What I'd Like to See
Honest take: I'd love conditional scheduling eventually. Something like "run this command only if I haven't pushed a commit today" or "remind me only if my calendar shows I'm not in a meeting." That's probably a heavier lift, but the Task Scheduler already handles the 80% case really well.
The other thing I'd want is a log view — a history of what tasks ran and when, so I can confirm a command actually executed and didn't silently skip. Right now I check side effects manually.
Getting Started
If you already have LacPointer installed, open it with Option+Space and look for the Task Scheduler in the sidebar. If you're on the free plan, the scheduler is included — no Pro subscription required to set up basic reminders and app launches.
Start small. Pick one thing you forget every single day and automate it. For me it was the Slack launch before standup. Took 30 seconds to set up and I haven't missed standup prep since. That's the kind of thing where the ROI is immediate and obvious.
If you want something more powerful on the command line side, lac-cli's agent can also run scheduled-ish tasks through its task tracking features — but for anything tied to clock time and recurring schedules, the Task Scheduler in LacPointer is the right tool.