Powerful Task Creation with Siri and Fantastical
Normally, the moment you realize you need to do something, it is while your’e doing something else (driving, brushing your teeth, etc.). It is usually the worst time to pull out your phone and actually type in a task. In this brief note, I’ll show you how to combine Siri with Fantastical to do just this. The powerful part comes in the fact that whatever you dictate to Siri then feeds right into Fantastical’s great NLP processing and it lets you integrate a wide variety of services together in one place with a single voice command.
How to do it
- Set up Fantastical with the accounts of your choice, e.g. Google Calendar/Apple Calendar, Todoist/Google Tasks/Reminders, etc.
- Create a shortcut that looks like this:
- Now simply run Siri however you want (e.g. say “Hey Siri” or long-press the button on your watch or phone that activates Siri, etc.).
- Say “Do It” (or whatever you want to name the shortcut).
- Speak the Fantastical-understood sentence you want (e.g. “Get milk tomorrow morning”)
Fantastical will then automatically know to add a task that defaults to 8AM tomorrow morning to get Milk. If your task manager of preference is Todoist, for example, then it will add it to the default project you suggested. But you can use more sophisticated examples as detailed here:
The whole process is shockingly simple and allows me to conveniently add tasks to apps of my choice with just a simple voice command. Admittedly, it’s not as smooth as e.g. using Apple’s native Reminders app, but it gives me the flexibility to use other task services I may prefer. What I like about Fantastical is that it allows you to also create events and in its visualization, tasks appear as calendar events, and you can easily drag and drop tasks to a specific time in a Desktop interface. So I feel you get the best of both worlds.
Some historical motivation
I’ve been obsessed with adding tasks simply since the introduction of the first-gen Moto 360 smartwatch.
Yes, Siri and Google Assistant have simple ways to do this that support their services via voice, but that’s really further-locking me into their walled garden. For example, I really feel comfortable in the app Todoist.
I have used Obsidian in this regard as well. A tweak to this setup makes it easy to add tasks via voice to your Obsidian daily note: