I posted about this on the Agenda community, but figured it belongs here as well: I made a Shortcut that provides for find and replace of term on the iOS version of the app, since it can't (yet) be done natively.

Please test this before using in practice, this method is a bit… brute force.

This Shortcut is run by sharing a whole note (Markdown) to it. It will ask for a term to search for, a term to replace that with, then replaces terms accordingly (case sensitive) in the original note, replacing the original note in its totality with the updated text.

Be cautious, because this will replace the matched term absolutely, so if you replaced “tow” with “truck”, the word “toward” becomes “truckard”. You get the idea.

Also, I'll admit this is a list bit brute force, because it is a wholesale replacement of a note with updated text, but I think this could be quite handy for turning keywords in to tags, or just plain renaming stuff.

Hope this is useful - your feedback is always welcome!

“You’re not dying, you just can’t think of anything good to do.” – Ferris Bueller

I’ll not exhaust the story too much, but a couple of months ago, the right side of my body went numb. This was scary, but thankfully, I was diagnosed with migraines (they don’t have to be pain headaches, I’ve learned), and prescribed meds to manage.

Since, symptoms have escalated, and that has led to MRI and more MRI and further testing. Who knows what is happening to me (we’ll figure it out in time), but I do know this:

My productivity has been galvanized like never before.

As I combat wild levels of fatigue, energy is now a very special resource. This means I ask, of all things I do, is this important enough to risk not being able to do the rest of my day?

Peeking behind the scenes a bit more, I’m on vacation from work, which was mostly planned ahead of time and fortuitous in timing since I can’t keep up, so I am lucky to not have to worry about that, but all else I do is done with incredible deliberateness.

“Time management” is the term that I hear most often, but it’s really “action management” (that which consumes time), which is really “choice management” (that which inspires action), which is really “values management” (that which drives choice). Never before have I been so clearly able to see a line so directly connecting my core values to what I am doing in every moment.

That’s probably exhausting too, but it makes me happy to live through.

I don’t know what the takeaway here is, except to say that, where possible, really identifying and then leaning in to core values to drive how one spends the time one has agency over is incredibly rewarding. And hopefully, you don’t have to have your whole body go numb to signal this.

It was just a month or so ago that was thinking I needed a good way to take particular OmniFocus lists with me on my watch, because I love ditching my phone when I can.

Lo and behold, Cheatsheet, an app I love, just added Shortcuts support. This means I can very easily create a list from OmniFocus and put it in a cheat, making it ready to take with me (requires Cheatsheat's Pro in-app purchase, but well worth it).

What's great about this is that I can make a complication that gets me right to this portable list of mine. Now, of course, I can't check stuff off, because it's just text, but it's a super convenient way of carrying a list to go.

A few bits about the Shortcut:

• Tune the Find Items OmniFocus action as you see fit. Yes, I could have done import questions, but there are so many different dimensions of how to select tasks to include that that didn't seem to make sense (I just use available tasks with a particular tag, but you could involve flags, dates, and any other number of things).
• Feel free to adjust how the text is passed to the cheat for each task. I used an ASCII circle to make each line feel OmniFocusesque, and also added blank lines between each, but you might want to personalize here.
• Pick the right Shortcut version. I made one for OmniFocus 3 as well as for those folks who might be running on the OmniFocus 4 beta.
• One thing you could do is set up a folder in Cheatsheet for this cheat, and then add actions to the beginning of the Shortcut to get and delete all cheats from that folder when you run it. The reason for this is intentionally enforcing a temporary kind of use here, which I am fond of. A setup like this doesn't lend well to Shortcut distribution, however, so I left it out.

Lastly, for anyone who thinks as much as I do about these things and since I did get some questions on Twitter, some thoughts about why I think Cheatsheet is great for this compared to other apps I could do this in:

• Drafts: This could surely be done in Drafts, but to me, Drafts is not a place I refer back to, it's where text starts™️.
• OmniFocus flagged: Sure, I could just flag stuff to show up in the flagged spot in OF itself, but that risks polluting what flags mean. And then what if I don't do stuff? Do I unflag? Re-flag?
• Reminders: Honestly, it's a miracle on some days that I can keep one productivity system going, adding another seems dangerous. Even if for one use case, it's risky. It feels like getting a bag of Skittles, but just for the yellow ones. That whole bag is getting eaten, no matter what I tell myself.

Anyway, enough of the preamble, here are the Shortcuts!

v1.21 update

• Minor update
• Added Maps as a source for phone numbers in the Phone branch
• Added alert to Bookmarked URLs branch to align to all the others

Download link below 👇🏻

v1.2 update

• Added branch for Things, using its show URL scheme query parameter to show a particular project, or else the id parameter to show a built-in list

v1.1 update

• Added branch for DEVONthink To Go
• Added branch for Craft (requires choosing the workspace to open when you actually use the URL, but hey, you play the hand you're dealt)
• Added branches for OmniFocus 4 Beta
• Added branch for Agenda 13.1 Beta
• Added comment actions to capture changelog and protips

I was listening my pals Jay Miller, Rosemary Orchard, and David Sparks discuss Hook on a recent episode of the Automators podcast, and got thinking about how often I benefit from linking across resources on my phone/iPad (or would like to benefit from it, if I actually did it more).

Some real examples:

• Put a phone number in an OmniFocus task
• Reference an OmniFocus project in an Agenda note
• Add a location in a Note

And plenty more.

So I got to thinking and assembled a new iOS Shortcut that I call Bubble Gum (because what better way to stick things together than with the stuff you have at hand?).

I really like running this Shortcut from Spotlight on an iPad, so that I can get to it whenever. It lets you search various things you might have and copies links to them to your clipboard for insertion elsewhere. I also use this on my phone set to the Back Tap accessibility move, because I can invoke that from anywhere.

As an aside, iPadOS does this infuriating thing where after running the Shortcut from Spotlight, Spotlight still holds the focus of typing, but ⌘+space will dismiss that (thanks to friends Christopher Lawley and Matthew Cassinelli for saving me from rage deleting my iPad).

Now, it wasn't until I was waaaaaay down the rabbit hole when the realization struck me: you can’t really link to a calendar event or note by url. That made me sad. So instead, I made the desired event or note details be captured in url-encoded JSON, and added that as a parameter in a url to run Bubble Gum later, which would identify the only possible event or note you mean to be referring to, and open it.

This has been enormously useful for me, and I hope it is for you, too! I can see myself adding other branches here and iterating on this, so let me know if there is something else you'd find useful to add!

I recently had the enormous pleasure of being able to return to Learn OmniFocus, joining Tim Stringer to share some moves about using iOS Shortcuts with OmniFocus . We also went through ways to use this to customize Home Screens with widgets, with particular thanks to great apps that augment Shortcuts capabilities:

• Charty
• WidgetPack
• ToolBox Pro

Tim has made a sample version of the video freely available to all, so I've added it here below, and is sharing the Shortcuts I built as part of his page highlighting this video/event.

Now in OmniFocus: Opens the Morning, Afternoon, Evening, or Weekend perspective in OmniFocus based on the day of the week and the time of day.

Now in OmniFocus Widget: An adaptation of the Now in OmniFocus Shortcut that displays tasks in a Widget, with some help from WidgetPack.

OmniFocus Charty Ring: This Shortcut makes use of Charty to display a graphical representation of your daily progress.

Add to OF List: Allows you to add a task, complete with notes, to a predefined list (project) in OmniFocus. Using this Shortcut eliminates the overhead of manually adding actions to projects and promotes consistency. This Shortcut leverages Toolbox Pro to create an attractive and functional menu.

Learn OmniFocus subscribers get a full-length video with more detail and context. If you're an OmniFocus user and haven't yet checked out the Learn OmniFocus resources, I highly recommend it.

I recently needed to conduct a series of user interviews at work to get feedback and engage in testing a new product, and thought this would be an awesome use case for Shortcuts, so that I could book meetings easily.

Searching the internet, though, the consensus seemed to be that you couldn't actually add invitees to an event or send them invites. I played around, though, and found a way to do it by first creating the event and then modifying it.

This was really satisfying to figure out, and even better to use - hopefully others like this, too!

My work is driven, in large part, by caffeine. If this has been valuable to you and you'd like to support my work, buying me a coffee would be lovely. Thank you!

Recently, I was introduced to Block Kit for Slack, and I was super pumped to try to work with this. Since my team at work uses agile and scrum for our work processes, and since we sometimes need to scrum through Slack if calendars collide, I though this would be a compelling use case for a block-based solution, and use Shortcuts to help assemble it.

The tl;dr of Slack Block Kit is that it's basically a big JSON payload that organizes content into a well-structured Slack post with sections, dividers, text, and interactions (like buttons or lists or forms).

The way my team scrums, we talk about what we did yesterday, what we're doing today, and calling out flags, roadblocks, or needs for help. Since I operate by a manager schedule and I use OmniFocus to manage tasks, this basically means I want a post that combines:

• yesterday's calendar events
• today's calendar events
• OmniFocus tasks that are flagged, available, and tagged with "Scrum"

I therefore set myself to build an iOS Shortcut. Getting that content is pretty straightforward, and combining it with text to have everything formatted in the right JSON construct is very doable.

Getting integrated with Slack isn't hard, but it's not nothing, either. Fortunately, Jake Bathman wrote a fantastic article on Medium that explains the process.

To make everything run smoothly, I also used Data Jar, a fantastic app for storing information to be used in Shortcuts, in this Shortcut for a few things:

• I keep the Slack API token in Data Jar, so that I don't accidentally share it (in the shared Shortcut here, it's at key Auth.Slack).
• I keep a dictionary of Slack channels in Data Jar to make it easy to interface with it (keys at Slack.<<channel name>>). You can make this dictionary, too, with my Data Jar Slack Dictionary Shortcut (which I have written about in a previous post).
• I keep a dictionary about my team (at keys Team.<<name>>) and each has a value for SlackAPILink. In this way, I can do a find and replace on the OmniFocus tasks, replacing each member of my team's name with their <@SLACK_API_ID>. I love this, because by simply adding someone's name in the task I have in OmniFocus, I will be @ mentioning them in the post that goes to Slack.

Here are a few other touches that the Shortcut handles for me:

• It is always assumed that "today" is a workday, so if I'm running this on Monday, the calendar from Friday will be shown (instead of the actual previous day, because please no Sunday meetings)
• The events from the previous calendar day and today are presented as lists to select what to include. They're all selected by default, but if I have an event that is confidential or personal, I can easily deselect it to exclude it from the post.
• If no OmniFocus tasks match the criteria, there is alternate content inserted.
• A footer is added to make it clear that the post happened by automation.

I am pretty certain this Shortcut, considering the above, won't work out of the box as shared, but I hope it provides adequate inspiration and framework for you to get value from. I'd love to hear what you think!

My work is driven, in large part, by caffeine. If this has been valuable to you and you'd like to support my work, buying me a coffee would be lovely. Thank you!