Automating My Daily Log Setup in Roam Using iOS Shortcuts

27 May 2020 •

At the start of each day, I like to see a quick overview of my calendar, tasks and the local weather. I find this valuable both on the day, to make sure I’m scheduling my time wisely, and in retrospect, when I look back and wonder why I did (or didn’t) get much done last week. Accompanied by other logging and journaling practices, this helps me get a better handle on how I’m spending my time.

The Shortcut I’m sharing here assumes use of first party apps for calendars and reminders, although more powerful task managers likely expose similar functionality. It collects the following information:

Weather forecast for today (at the current location, using the stock Weather app)
A quote of the day from an RSS feed
Calendar events happening today, including the start and end times for non-all day events
Tasks which are due today or overdue, from Reminders
Tasks which are high priority (regardless of due date), from Reminders

This information is formatted into a structure suitable for pasting directly into Roam Research, but could be easily re-formatted to suit any other note taking software of your choice. Simply modify the ‘Text’ blocks to structure the output in a way that suits you.

To demonstrate how this works, a couple of the key ‘actions’ (the building blocks of iOS Shortcuts) querying the Reminders app are shown below. These filters are powerful and easily customizable, operating on most of the available attributes set in Reminders and sorting the results. Feel free to experiment with these filters to customize the Shortcut to your needs.

At the end of the Shortcut, the output is collated and formatted in a single ‘Text’ block, here formatted assuming Roam outline-style nesting. (N.B. At the time of writing, Roam does not yet expose an API, but this may be coming soon). Finally, the Shortcut opens the URL of your Roam database in Safari, so you can paste in the formatted content.

If you’d like to try this out, you can get the Shortcut here. If this is your first third party Shortcut, you will need to allow untrusted Shortcuts in Settings first.