Plant Watering
These next two automations are a good example of how you can build short cuts on your home screen and tie short cuts together. While plenty of apps log plant watering, I wanted to see if Shortcuts could do it for me. First, I created a short cut that, whenever I run it, grabs the current date and time and adds that to a dedicated plant-watering note to keep a consistent log. I then tapped on the drop-down menu at the top of the app and clicked Add to Home Screen. Now, each time I do the chore, I can tap that app icon to log it.
That alone could have been helpful, but I wanted to push the automation a little further. I created another short cut that, every morning at 9am, finds the plant-watering log and sees if it was modified within the last week. If no changes have been added within the last week, it sends me a notification reminder to check on the plants.
Screenshot Extracting
Although this automation is a little more niche, I use it fairly often as someone who’s chronically online and often taking screenshots. Now, whenever I take a screenshot, my phone automatically extracts any text in the images and copies it to my clipboard. This simplifies my previous process of saving screenshots, manually opening the Photos app, then copying the text from the images.
Plane Landing
This one isn’t very complicated, but it makes my life just a little bit easier. I often travel without my partner and can be negligent in sending updates. So I asked the Shortcuts app to generate an automation that sends a “just landed” text to my partner every time I turn off airplane mode. Simple. During set-up, the app asked me to select which iPhone contact was my partner. It’s an easy automation that solves the issue of me being incredibly distracted when deplaning.
Sound Recognising
While this short cut requires you to adjust your accessibility settings, the extra hassle seems worth it for the payoff. I’m almost always wearing headphones when working from home, with the music turned up quite loud. I’m also anxious about not hearing someone knocking on my door or ringing the bell. There’s a fix! Start by going into your Accessibility settings, then find Sound & Name Recognition. Here you can enable sound recognition for everything from glass breaking to babies crying; I picked Door Bell and Door Knock.
Since I don’t always have my phone on me while wearing headphones, the basic notification wouldn’t be that helpful. So I beefed it up by building a short cut so that when my iPhone recognises either sound, it pauses whatever is playing. Now I can blast my podcasts without worrying about missing a package delivery.
This story originally appeared on WIRED US.