Shortcuts Tutorial – How To Create A Shortcut

When you’re making the perfect blog post there are a lot of moving parts. It would be easy to forget one or two pieces of the process as you go about putting it all together. I think it’s a good idea to have a list of all that needs to be done and to use it. In this video I show you how to use Shortcuts, the app from Apple to automate making your list in Reminders. It would also be possible to change this shortcut to send the list into something else like Omnifocus, things or one of the other GTD applications.
I like using this method of making the list because it allows me to choose which of my blogs I am working with. It lets me decide if I’m going to do the full Monty which includes audio and video. All I can just create a blog post using just text, text with audio or text with video.

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Within this shortcut we used the list method of choosing from two items and created variables based upon the choice. I also used a menu to give me a set of four choices and the shortcut builds it all from there. I needed to add a couple of dates. I needed the date for today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and for one week. This allowed me to set the reminders with a due date. It’s possible then to look into reminders and see what is scheduled. This way you can plan out your day or even your week.

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It’s quite satisfying to have a list of tasks to be completed and to see the list becoming smaller as you get the job done. The first part of this shortcut puts together the list with regard to the creation of the perfect blog post. The second part of the list adds three more reminders to cover extra social network posts to tell the world about your blog post.

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You can follow this recipe for making a similar, more personalised version of the shortcut. Or you can download the pre-made shortcut to your iOS device, make minimal changes to fit your purpose.

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If you don’t want to use an automated way of creating your list of tasks you can also use something like Drafts and use a simple list syntax. This gives you a very simple list to work with and no dates. There is also the notes application which you can create a list, but again you don’t get any due dates. The good thing about using this automated list creation as you see in this video is that it is free. You can download the Shortcuts app for free and reminders is already installed on your system. If you don’t mind paying for some software you might look at Omnifocus. I might make another version of this shortcut which sends the list into Omnifocus instead. I already have a Drafts action which takes a list and sends it into Omnifocus. The Shortcuts way of doing it is preferable because it allows you to choose which parts of the full list are relevant to the project you have in mind.

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