Day Five: The Daily Journal, Five Days of OmniFocus Shortcuts

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.

HeyScottyJ @heyscottyj