Working with Data Lists

Part of The Shortcuts Series

In Part 2 of the Shortcuts series, we discussed building smart shortcuts that react to our choices and perform tasks accordingly.

We will take that foundation further in this post by building shortcuts for cases where we need to work with a data list, tweak the items to fit our requirements and pull data from frequently used apps to ease our work.

Don't worry if this sounds overwhelming.

We will be approaching the process step-by-step by building shortcuts that are helpful in real life and mirror our day-to-day situations.

Let's start by building:

An adaptive daily journal template

Journaling has never been a big thing in my life. I've tried my hand at many formats, but nothing has worked so far. However, there has been one format that has worked better than the others.

That is the “highlights of the day” journaling format.

In this format, you note your highlight of the day against a date to journal tiny accomplishments and happy moments.

While this is fine on most days, there were days when I had more than one highlight spread across different areas, such as health, work, family or hobbies that I wanted to note and remember.

A generic, all-inclusive journaling template doesn't work well here because we don't usually have highlights across all areas of life every day.

We can address this situation by creating an adaptive template that asks for the areas in life we would like to add highlights for and then creating sections only for the selected areas, like this: