Automation ideas

February 25, 2019

When I have bought new iPhone with preinstalled ios 12 and new Shortcuts app, it was naturally for me to start automate everything, that I'm doing on a phone. But, there were not so many:
I have created morning shortcut (turn off sleep mode, show weather & todo list), and evening routine (even simpler: set do not disturb mode, open alarm app).
All automation solutions, that I see in macstories or hear in numerous podcasts did not clicked for me. But the more I'm playing with this, the more I realize, that I can do more with a phone and implement new ways of interaction. Creating new shortcuts or scripts in Scriptable or actions in Drafts is not very easy, or even possible sometimes. The hardest part is to actually find new things to automate and find what can be actually usefully, and not just produce whistles, that were made for fun and neglected on next day. I'll try to make posts time to time to describe what I'm doing and what I got from these scripts.

As quick example, I have added several actions to Drafts. Each of them consist from one step: call callback url to Things to create new todo.

• create new task:
  things:///add?titles=[[draft]]
• same, but with notes:
  things:add?title=[[title]]&notes=[[body]]
• instead of notes, here each line transferred into checklist:
  things:add?title=[[title]]&checklist-items=[[body]]
• very often I create new todo related to home project, that can be done only on weekend:
  things:add?title=[[title]]&notes=[[body]]&when=saturday&list-id=ED7BB6BD-7F6C-466B-84AD-B9C5E580D51F

Since I have added these actions, I hardly ever add new tasks directly in Things app. By and large, Drafts app become my input method in phone and I hope to write more about it later.