It’s day five of my series of posts about the wonderful addition of Shortcuts automation in OmniFocus 3.4 for iOS, and I’ve saved the big one for last. Today’s Shortcut is something that is, for me, a really useful tool for creating an ongoing diary of my life.
This Daily Journal shortcut creates a rich text (from markdown) summary of the day, including:
- weather conditions and high/low temperatures
- OmniFocus actions due (or overdue) today
- OmniFocus actions which are flagged and available
- OmniFocus actions which are tagged with the forecast tag and available
- a list of calendar events
- a list of all-day calendar events
I have this outputting markdown and rich text to make this easily extensible for storing the output (I send everything to Agenda, but it could go to any variety of apps that can get content from Shortcuts.
I want to thank Alex Hay, author of the Toolbox Pro app with Shortcuts actions and the Snapshot Journal. His dictionary actions to replace weather conditions with the right emoji were what I used here, and the work he’s done is brilliant.
And that’s the series! I’m a huge fan of the work the OmniGroup has done to enable automation of OmniFocus and create more utility for its content, and have had a blast writing about and sharing some of the ways I’m using this. I’d love any and all feedback about these posts or how you’re using Shortcuts with OmniFocus!
Missed day one’s Shortcut? Check out the Boss Review here.
Missed day two’s Shortcut? Check out the Project Markdown Table here.
Missed day three’s Shortcut? Check out Today’s Actions here.
Missed day four’s Shortcut? Check out the Inbox Processor here.
HI Scotty,
These shortcuts are really useful, thanks for sharing! You mentioned in your post that you like to output the Daily Journal to Agenda. I would love to do the same thing, but I’m struggling to figure out how to get Shortcuts to let me actually output the results of Daily Journal into a new note. I have the “Create Note in Project” shortcut available, but even after telling it which project to add the note to, it just creates a blank shortcut. I feel like there’s something I’m missing to get the “Make rich text from Text” action hook up with the Agenda action and actually create the note… any tips you might have?
Thanks!
Hi Scotty – I figured out that you have to use x-callback-url to do this. You can remove these two comments if you like. Again, thanks for the posts!
Haha you beat me to it!
But for anyone else’s benefit, yes, Agenda needs x-callback-urls, which also means defining each of the required parameters:
– target project title (project-title)
– note title (title)
– note content (text)
A version of this Shortcut that sends content all the way to Agenda is here:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/ba4cf19a62814d3cbdf6ac8b924d358c
Thanks for reading, Jason!
Scotty Jackson mentioned this Article on heyscottyj.com.
Scotty, this is really useful! Thank you!
I’ve modified the Daily Journal shortcut to make it my own and send the data to Day One.
I’m having trouble figuring out if it’s possible to show the OF item tags in the text for each item. I’d love to show the tags.
Thanks for any input.
Alex
Hey nice! Glad you’re finding use in this and customizing!
So I looked in to this, and yeah, it looks like Tags are not returned as part of OmniFocus Items. That’s too bad. The best workarounds I could think of were:
That’s what came to mind. Hope that helps?
Thanks, Scotty. I think I’ll use the Find Items for the major tags I use and organize by those. Thanks, again!