Automating Apple Shortcuts
Automating apple shortcuts is one of the easiest ways to increase your daily productivity. It’s quite easy to automate any of your shortcuts, and an automation itself can be a brand new shortcut if you’d like.
Creating the automation
To start, open up your shortcuts application on your iPhone or iPad. Navigate to the automation section, and click the “+” icon at the top of the screen.
From here you have two choices:
- Personal Automations
- Home Automations
For this tutorial, we will only be covering personal automations. However, home automations works similarily, and are as easy to set up.
Triggers
Now that you have a new automation, you have a few selections to choose from. Each of these can be thought of as “triggers,” and each one can trigger your automation to be ran. They’re pretty self explanatory so I won’t go into too much detail about them.
For this tutorial I’ll be using a time trigger, simulating when I wake up in the morning a shortcut I could run. You could also use the alarm trigger, for when you turn your alarm off on the morning.
Now that we have an automation, and a trigger to set it off, we have to create the shortcut that the automation runs. There are two ways to do this, and you can do a mix of both as well:
- Reference a pre made shortcut. I’ve already created a guide for creating your first shortcut here.
- Create your shortcut within the automation. This option means you can only run your shortcut when the automation is ran, however this option is good for smaller automations that only need to be ran once or twice a day, and never on your own accord.
Regardless of which option you chose, you’re ready to set up your actions.
Actions
Because I am using the first option from above, my automation will be fairly simple. I just want the automation to run one of my shortcuts each morning before I wake up.
I’ve already created my shortcut I’d like to be ran. If you’d like to use this shortcut, you can view the guide for creating it here.
Search your action list for “Shortcuts” and drag “Run Shortcut” over to your automation. Click whichever shortcut you’d like to run, and specify the properties of the action to fit your needs.
Add as many other actions as you’d like to your automation. If not, feel free to call it a day.
Congrats, you created your first automation today 👏👏 !
Check back next week for more tips on Apple Shortcuts!
