Automating My Obsidian Daily Note
How I use iOS Shortcuts to automatically create and populate my daily note.
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Up until now, I have been manually creating my daily note in Obsidian every morning. I start many days in the early AM with offshore meetings. So I don’t always get to sit down and plan my day before I get started. Often, I am neck-deep in a conversation when I first need to add something to my daily note only to find I haven’t even created today’s note yet. If you look at my daily note template, you’ll see one of the main components is a checklist I use to get the day started. Recently, because of this shift at the start of my day, I am not getting it done. So in order to solve this issue, I decided to dive into macOS Shortcuts this weekend and see what I could do to automate the creation so they are ready when I start my day.
Setting Up the Shortcut
Since Shortcuts are now available on the Mac with the introduction of macOS Monterey, I decided to see what I could come up with. Although it doesn’t seem ready for prime time, I was able to get something working, kind of. I created the entire shortcut for creating the note in macOS only to find that automation for scheduling the running of shortcuts is not available in macOS yet. So I switched to iOS.
Moving to iOS, I was surprised to find almost everything I did on macOS worked fine in iOS. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the note gets created and even the most of templates get run. I did have to redo my Calendar integration that retrieves today's meetings and adds them to my note. But that was rather easy in retrospect. Overall, I am pleasantly surprised by how well it went. I see a lot of potential for different hacks to automate different tasks in my note-taking arsenal.
Incidentally, if this is what “no-code” programming is going to look like, I think we developers are safe for a while.
Let’s look at what it is we want to accomplish. The goal is to have today’s note created when…
