Automating Shortcuts

Part of The Shortcuts Series

In Part 4, we discussed creating shortcuts that leverage AI actions to do complex tasks in a few steps.

In this part of the series, we will make our Shortcuts more useful by learning how to automatically run shortcuts at a specific time or on a specific event.

Let's start by understanding:

What automation does here

Until now, we've been manually running the shortcuts we've created in this series whenever we needed to do something like adding tasks, saving items, etc.

However, there could be shortcuts, as we've seen in previous parts of this series, that are useful to run predictably at specific times of the day or when something happens, without our intervention.

For such shortcuts, the Automation feature in the Shortcuts app will be a helpful tool for the job.

Now, here's the thing:

While automations in the Shortcuts app might look similar to shortcuts because you can create an entire action flow within an automation, it's simpler to consider them as an automated trigger for your usual shortcuts.

If you've used Zapier or IFTTT, Shortcuts automation will feel similar.

Let's understand this further by creating a simple automation to: