How To Increase Your Productivity With Apple Shortcuts: Creating Your First Shortcut
Productivity is a Problem
Many of us have busy days. The ins and the outs of work, school, picking up food for dinner tonight — which yes, includes the slaving hours of actually cooking dinner as well. At times it can be hard to track our productivity, and more importantly, use our schedule to actually benefit us. Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a booming business, a desk-worker at the office, or a little bit of both, scheduling is a necessary skill that is needed for a productive life.
The problem for most of us, is we all spend time trying to keep track of everything to do. Bruce Lee said,
If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done
If we could spend less time thinking about what we need to do, when we need to do it, or what’s next on our agenda, we could focus on actually completing the task ahead of us.
Many of us are familiar with apple’s shortcuts app. Released in late 2018 with apple’s iOS 12 update, it allows users to utilize Siri and all of her knowledge of a certain user. According to apple:
A shortcut is a quick way to get one or more tasks done with your apps. The Shortcuts app lets you create your own shortcuts with multiple steps.
Whether that be the apps you use, the schedule you thrive on, or just in general how you use your phone; the app enables you to create shortcuts from apps to help make your day easier, and because of this, more productive.
Examples include connecting your phone to CarPlay; automatically opening the location for the next event in your calendar on maps, or beginning to play a playlist you’ve recently listened to.
To begin, we’ll start with an easy shortcut that drastically saves time in the morning. This shortcut helps the user have 20/20 vision for their day ahead of them by compiling their calendar events for the day. The shortcut can even be set up to automatically run once per day — perhaps in the morning right before your alarm, or at night before going to bed. To find out more on how to automate this shortcut, check out the bottom of this guide.
If you’re new to shortcuts and would like to view the shortcut, or just want to download it, the link is at the bottom of the page.
I have an iPad Pro 4th Gen, currently running iOS 14.0.1
Creating Shortcut:
Navigate to your shortcuts app and create a new shortcut:
You can give the shortcut a name by clicking the blue button on the top next to where it says “New Shortcut.” Name it something like “Daily Events.”
Part I
In the first section of this shortcut, we’ll look at parsing our calendar events to find events that are coming up today, and convey them and their time to the user.
Step 1. Find and filter calendar events
Now the fun begins. On the right you have your action list. According to Apple, an action is…
the building block of a shortcut — is a single step in a task.
…and within the same documentation, you can
Mix and match actions to create shortcuts that interact with the apps and content on your iOS or iPadOS device, as well as with content and services on the Internet. Each shortcut is made up of one or more actions.
So now that we know what actions are, we can begin to build a shortcut by piecing these actions together.
Start searching your actions for “calendar,” and open the shortcuts pertaining to the calendar app. Drag Find Calendar Events over to your shortcut.
Make sure the start day is set to is today, and add another modifier. Start Date is after current date. We only want events that are today, but haven’t happened yet.
After that, drag another Find Calendar Events action under your original, and it should revert to a filtering action. If it doesn’t, try connecting your variables under the properties of this action to your original calendar events.
Make sure the start date is still today, and add a couple new modifiers. These modifiers are for the calendars you’d like you shortcut to parse, I have my work, school schedule, and general events calendars added. Feel free to add as many you want, but be sure to change the first modifier to “Any of the following or true” or else these modifiers will contradict each other.
Then drag a add to variable action out of your action list. Variables will help us store information for later use. Connect it to your filtered events and label it something similar to “all events.” This variable will hold all of the events you’ve filtered for the remainder of the shortcut’s lifecycle.
Step 2. Number of calendar events NOCE
The next action you need is a scripting action, search for “Count” and drag the calculator icon action onto your shorcut. You should see the two actions snap together with a line. This means the output of one action, automatically becomes the input to another action.
Make sure your script is counting the items in your All Events variable
The drag a variable action to your shortcut. We want to track how many events we have scheduled today, so change the input variable to Count, and give it a name. I typically use acronyms to name my variables, but not always. It doesn’t matter what you name your variable, as long as it makes sense to you. See if you can guess this variable’s acronym, answer will be at the bottom right next to the clap icon 👏 !
Step 3. If statement
Next, we’ll add an if action, and we want to check if we’ve collected any values at all from our calendar. This is checking to see whether there are any events today, and if there aren’t, then what should the shortcut do.
Well I like to be notified, even if I don’t have a specific output I’m looking for. In fact, it gives me a sense of accomplishment or relaxed feeling when running the shortcut and seeing that I have no events scheduled for the day.
Here we have also have a new variable being added. This variable is called Calendar, and contains the entire output message for the user at the end of the shortcut. We will continue to use this variable for the rest of the shortcut. For the first instance, we’re at the highest point in our if actions. Therefore, if there are no events, this will be the only input into our Calendar variable for the remainder of the shortcuts lifecycle.
You may also see the text box which contains variable within it. We can cross reference variables and use them within notification by adding them to text actions, and using them as such.
However, if we do have a value we want to check how many events we have. If our number of calendar events is greater than 1, and if so we run the next set of actions:
Step 4. More than 1 event
We use another text action to add more info into our ending message to convey to the user. This action is letting the user know the number of events scheduled that day, being sure to use our variable we created in the last step.
Next we want to add a repeat action, which basically repeats a block of actions the amount of times an input it pushed to it. So if we have 10 events, we want this block of code to be ran for each event. The action also lends us two smart variables, repeat item and repeat index. These are pretty self explanatory, but just imagine the repeat item as just one of those 10 events (with it’s specific properties) and the repeat index is which one of those events your looking at; for example the 6th event. Remember these variables as they become useful pretty quick.
We want to add another bit of information into our ending message. Here we have to be very specific of the properties of the calendar events. To correctly interpolate our properties, we need to tell the shortcut which properties exactly we want to pull. We want the title of the event for the first variable interpolate, and the start date in short term for the second interpolate.
Be sure to collect only the short hand fo the time format. Remember, we’re pulling only dates from today, so we don’t need the date of the object, just the time. We’re also preparing as much information as we can in the least amount of space as we can. This is why we use the short hand time.
That text is then added to the Calendar variable.
Step 5. Otherwise, step 4
If there is not more than 1 event today, we want a completely different formatted message. This message is more formatted to convey there’s only one event today. Be sure to connect your variables. Add that text to Calendar variable.
My message was simply “You have 1 event scheduled for today: Event Name at Event Date”
Note that I connected my NOCE variable, but it was not needed since there will only be one event if we get this far down in our if actions.
Step 6. Push Notification
Search your action list for “notification” and drag out the show notification action. This action allows you to push a notification to the device through the shortcut. This is how we will be presenting our information.
Make the title “Daily Events,” or whatever you named your project, and be sure to connect the Calendar variable into the text box. Congratulations, you’re done with part 1.
Part II
The second part of our shortcut finds out if we have an event within the next couple of hours, and tells us what time we should leave at, similarity to Siri.
Step 1. Find calendar events, again
We’re going to filter our All Events variable again, however this time we only want 1 calendar event. This event will be the closest event to our current date, and time, by default. Be sure to check the filter properties and check the limit box. We only need the event closest to us.
Yay! More If actions. The first if action checks if the event is within the next two hours. Be sure to connect the start date, a property of the event we’re pulling. This if statement can be altered to your liking, you can change the amount of hours to something that fits your schedule. However, 2 hours works perfectly for me, as it gives me enough time to get ready even if I’ve forgotten about the event.
We then want to check if the event has a location value. Using the events location property, we can check if it has a value. If it does, great! We can make the shortcut even more helpful to the user.
If both of the above if actions come out true, then we’re ready to present the next piece of information to the user.
Step 2. When should I leave?
Using one the get travel time maps action, we can calculate how long it takes to get to the event location (I can’t stress enough, make sure to connect the correct properties)
Using the adjust date calendar action, we can subtract the travel time in seconds from the time of the event. We want to do this a second time in minutes from our first altered time. You input here can be whatever you’d like, by changing this value you change how early you’d like to be at the event.
Add the second adjusted date to a new variable, and label it TTL, or Time to Leave.
Create a text action and formulate a simple sentence interpolated with your variables that informs the user when to leave. My sentence would look something like this:
You should leave for you biology class at 7:30, it takes 20 minutes to get there.
Be sure to connect all the correct properties of each object.
Add this text to another variable, and give another generic name related to the time you need to leave. Remember, only you need to be able to differentiate your variable names.
Step 3. Push notification, again
We’re going to use the push notification action again, but this time we’re pushing our last created variable. Be sure to connect your variable if it doesn’t automatically, and title it “Time To Leave,” or something similar.
Congrats! You’re done 👏👏
To get this shortcut to run every morning, or at any given time of the day you have to set up an automation. The guide for automating shortcuts can be found here.
NOCE = Number Of Calendar Events :)
