My app gathers a bunch of phone numbers on a page. Once the user hits the submit button I create a celery task to call each number and give a reminder message then redirect
If you look at the celery DOCS on tasks you see that to call a task synchronosuly, you use the apply() method as opposed to the apply_async() method.
So in your case you could use:
reminder.apply(args=[number])
The DOCS also note that:
If the CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER setting is set, it will be replaced by a local apply() call instead.
Thanks to @JivanAmara who in the comments reiterated that when using apply(), the task will run locally(in the server/computer in which its called). And this can have ramifications, if you intended to run your tasks across multiple servers/machines.