Getting Started with Shortcuts

Part of The Shortcuts Series

Apple's Shortcuts app has been around for quite a while, but not many people use it in their everyday workflows.

Partly because it might appear confusing and partly because Apple doesn't market this product too often.

If you've been oblivious to this app on your Apple device or have seen it but found it challenging to use, this series will help.

Through this series, I'll explain how I convert workflow ideas into working shortcuts, the foundational actions that will help you build your automation, and help you get a direction to start building your custom shortcuts for work and personal cases.

Let's start by understanding:

The approaches to visualising a shortcut

The first step to creating any shortcut is projecting the workflow or task as a sequence of actions that will make up the shortcut.

During this visualisation process, I usually place the idea into one of these two buckets to understand where to begin: