How I still have Straight A’s in University
All thanks to a simple Apple Shortcut I developed.
This guide shows you how my shortcut School Events works. The download/share link can be found at the bottom!
To get this shortcut to work, please be sure to check out this guide first.
Preparing: Getting Ready for the Storm
Over the past few months, I’ve been preparing strenuously for University. Making sure all of my scholarships were in place, being sure I had enough credits to be a full time student, and worst of all, making sure all of my books had been ordered before the first day.
Every student knows how stressful school can be, and these were only the days leading up to my first year in University. Now that the semester has begun, I have a whole other set of responsibilities, such as making sure those scholarships stay afloat, which is dependent on my grade.
Before school had started, I set off a block of time to come up with as many ideas as I could to prepare myself for college level activity.
You see, I’ve never been quite good at being productive, but to me that’s the whole point.
Sometimes, your biggest strength is just awareness of your worst weakness.
I created a numbers spreadsheet for my schedule so that I could easily check it whenever I needed to. This featured a time block schedule, which counted by 15 minutes at a time. Each class had it’s individual time blocks merged together, each with the class name, time frame, and classroom number.
I wasn’t going to give myself any room for failure, I was capitalizing on my weakness to prove to myself that I could do this hard thing, even in the face of my worst trait — productivity.
I printed several versions of my schedule out.
I was the first freshmen to sign up for one of the scholarships my university offered, and applied for as many others as I could find.
I made sure each one of my books had a delivery time, and even created a personal invoice for the books so I knew exactly when I had ordered them, and how much I payed for them.
I emailed my advisor back whenever I received an email from him, alerting him that I was eager to start school.
I tell you all of these things not to brag about how well I had prepared myself for school, but rather to show that conquering your weaknesses is a matter of grinding your teeth, putting in the work, and simply facing the bull head on.
I also developed one of the most useful Apple Shortcuts that, to this day, still saves me an amazing amount of time, and that I make use of every day. This shortcut allowed me to do all of the aforementioned activities when school started because I had less food on my plate.
Set Up
Firstly, it must be mentioned that you’ll need to do the following before you can create this shortcut.
- A dedicated reminders list for school related objects, assignments, etc. This should be a list that you update every day or so, reminding you of assignments you may still have to do, or papers you need to turn in for your next scholarship.
- A dedicated calendar for school related events in your iOS calendar application. Don’t use you calendar app? That’s ok, check and see if you’re school’s online assignment program has some sort of digital calendar for your assignments. Typically you can download this, and save it as an updating calendar so that all of your assignments will be uploaded automatically. If not, just try to stay on top of your assignments. The best way to do this is by adding an assignment as soon as it’s mention in class, or taking a portion of your day to reflect back on each class. Another good way to do this is by referencing your sneaky syllabus, which is a good idea anyways :)
As mentioned earlier, the shortcut will also require a previously developed and shared shortcut which I have created a guide for. Be sure to check out this shortcut before reading on.
As always, you can simply download the shortcuts without reading the guide. If you’re having problems downloading any shortcut, be sure to check out this guide as well.
Calendar Events
To start off, we want to gather all of our calendar events that fit certain standards. Apple allows us to do this by using their Find Calendar Events action. This action allows us to add modifiers. Here are the modifiers I use:
- Start date is in the next 7 days
- Calendar is Assignments
Simply put, we’re gathering the next week of events in our assignment calendar. My assignment calendar is simply called “Assignments.”
We then use a similar set of actions as many other shortcuts, which counts the amount of events we find, assigns this number to a variable, and prepares a notification accordingly:
1. If we do not find any events, i.e. count is equal to zero,
You have no assignments
2. If we have multiple events, i.e. count is greater than 1,
You have NumberOfEvents assignments scheduled for this week:
• EventName on (Start Time) at (Start Date)
The above lines make use of shortcut’s integrated variable actions, which stores information and recalls it at a later date.
The second line repeats with each assignment found in the calendar search.
3. If we only have 1 event, i.e. count is equal to 1,
You have NumberOfEvents event scheduled for today: EventName on (Start Time) at (Start Date)
The formulation of these is just to make our notification appear more user friendly, and to make it self aware of how humans would talk and formulate sentences. You wouldn’t list an empty list of assignments, and if you only had 1 assignment you wouldn’t list it out as if you had many.
We then present the notification to the user by dragging the Show Notification action to our shortcut. Be sure to connect the entire notification variable to the text input of the notification action. The title should also be set to “School Events,” or “Assignments.”
Reminders
Apple’s Shortcuts allows us to call upon any other shortcut we’ve created before, and to pass an input into these shortcuts. If you have any programming language, this should look very familiar to you. It’s similar to function calling to receive different outputs dependent on the input that’s passed.
I’ve already created (and written a guide) on my reminders shortcut, however I will review with a brief summary for the sake of this guide how the shortcut works.
Because my reminders shortcut was meant to be used by other shortcuts or by standalone if needed, I created it to be able to take in inputs. These inputs are intended to be which list of reminders you’d like to receive a summary of. For instance, if you’d like a summary of your grocery list, your input would be “Grocery List.” Similarly if you’d want a summary of your school reminders, your input would be “School.” The shortcut then runs it’s course and presents a notification.
You can mention another shortcut by searching your action list for “Shortcuts,” and dragging the Run Shortcut action into your shortcut. To provide an input for this shortcut, simply connect another action above it, or in our case, drag a Text action above the Run Shortcut action and type “School,” into the Text action.
All in All
This shortcut is ran almost every day for me, as it drastically reduces the amount of time I have to spend searching for assignments. It can even be set up with an automation to run every time you get to school, or when I arrive at the library for study time.
I owe my workflow productivity largely to the shortcut, and like the title suggests, it’s the reason I still have all A’s in University!
If you have trouble keeping track of assignments and when they are due, I recommend checking the shortcut out. The publication which hosts this guide also has many other shortcuts available for workflow and productivity alike!
Thanks for reading :)
