2023.04.06.

Fantastical adds broader Shortcuts support

Flexibits just released Fantastical 3.7.9, which adds a bunch of new Shortcuts actions, including the ability to filter events from a given Calendar Set in a given date range, and the ability to generate a simple schedule for a given day.

Nice! I have a shortcut which syncs up calendar events with agenda items in Things. Now, I can automatically do the following in one shortcut:

  1. Get all my meetings for today from Fantastical.
  2. Create or find existing agenda items about them in Things.
  3. Link the Things agenda item and Fantastical event using Hookmark.
  4. Start a new session from Things when the meeting is due.
    • I’ll write about how I manage deep sessions with Things one day.

2021.10.28.

Using Shortcuts to remind me to charge my iPhone

I ran into the issue a couple of times where my iPhone ran out of battery, and I forgot to charge it. In the morning, it was completely dead when I needed it.

To avoid this problem, I created two Shortcuts automation, which makes sure that I won’t forget to charge my iPhone.

When my iPhone battery is below 15%, Shortcuts creates a new reminder 5 minutes into the future to remind me to charge my phone.

When I’m sitting at my Mac, Reminders will ping me to charge my iPhone. I can grab my phone and plug it in.

The other automation runs when I plug my phone in. It finds all reminders created by the previous automation and marks them as completed.

This automated reminder requires no work from my side, but it saved my bacon a couple of times.