How I Use Apple Shortcuts to Save 25 Minutes Every Morning (3 Shortcuts, No Scripting)

TL;DR: I built three Apple Shortcuts that replaced the worst part of my morning: the 25 minutes I used to spend staring at my screen trying to figure out what my day looked like. “What’s Today?” pulls my calendar and builds a daily briefing note in seconds. “Prep This One” creates a meeting prep note with attendees already filled in. “Three Things” is an end-of-day prompt that feeds my Friday review automatically. None of them require scripting. All of them use the visual Shortcuts editor and built-in Apple apps. I’ve been running them daily for nine months.

I timed myself one morning in October. Not on purpose. I’d read something about “time to first meaningful work” and got curious, so I opened a stopwatch when I sat down at my desk and didn’t stop it until I did something that actually mattered.

Twenty-eight minutes.

Twenty-eight minutes of opening Calendar and scrolling through the day. Checking Slack to see what happened overnight. Opening my notes from yesterday to remember where I left off. Glancing at my task list. Going back to Calendar because I’d already forgotten whether my 10 a.m. was a one-on-one or a cross-functional sync. Checking Slack again.

I wasn’t procrastinating. I was orienting. Trying to assemble the shape of my day from five different apps, none of which talk to each other unless you make them.

That was the morning I started building the first Shortcut. Nine months later, I run three of them. The orientation phase is down to about three minutes. That’s not a guess. I timed it again in May.

Here’s how they work, step by step. No AppleScript, no Terminal commands, no Shortcuts experience required. Just the visual editor and apps you already have.

Who Should Skip This Post

If you already have a morning routine that gets you into real work within the first ten minutes, stop reading. Your system works. Don’t fix it.

If you don’t use an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, these won’t apply. Shortcuts is Apple-only.

And if you’ve built complex Shortcuts before with API calls and scripting actions, this will feel basic. That’s intentional. These three Shortcuts are simple on purpose. The complicated ones I’ve built are the ones I stopped running.

The Problem Isn’t Discipline. It’s Gathering.

Most productivity advice treats the morning drift as a motivation problem. Just wake up earlier. Just start with your hardest task. Just don’t check Slack until 10 a.m.

I’ve tried all of that. The issue was never motivation. It was that I couldn’t start working until I knew what the day looked like, and assembling that picture required opening four apps and holding the information in my head while I context-switched between them. Calendar for the schedule. Notes for yesterday’s loose ends. Reminders for the task list. Slack for what landed overnight.

The 25 minutes weren’t wasted on distraction. They were wasted on gathering. And gathering is exactly the kind of repetitive, structured work that a Shortcut can do in seconds.

Shortcut 1: “What’s Today?” (Saves ~12 Minutes)

This is the one that changed my mornings. I run it the moment I sit down, usually before I’ve even opened a browser.

It does three things: pulls today’s calendar events, identifies my open time blocks, and creates a daily note with everything laid out. When it finishes, I’m looking at a single note that tells me the shape of my day. No app-switching, no scrolling, no trying to hold six meetings in my head at once.

How to Build It

Open the Shortcuts app and create a new Shortcut. I named mine “What’s Today?” but call it whatever you’ll remember.

Step 1: Get today’s events.

Add a Find Calendar Events action. Set the filters: Start Date is today, and Calendar is whichever calendar holds your work schedule. If you use multiple work calendars, you’ll run this action once per calendar (I pull from “Work” and “Side Project” separately).

Sort the results by Start Date, ascending. This matters. Without sorting, the events come back in whatever order they were created, which is useless when you’re trying to see your day chronologically.

Step 2: Count the meetings.

Add a Count action right after. This gives you a number you can drop into the note later. Sounds trivial, but seeing “6 meetings today” versus “2 meetings today” at the top of your daily note changes how you plan the gaps.

Step 3: Build the note body.

Add a Text action. This is where you design your daily note template. Mine looks like this:

# Today: [Current Date]
## Meetings: [Count]
[Repeat results go here]
## Open Windows
(filled in below)
## Top 3
- 
- 
-

For the meeting list, add a Repeat with Each block that loops through your calendar results. Inside the repeat, use a Text action formatted like:

**[Start Time] - [End Time]** [Title]

You get the start and end times from the Get Details of Calendar Events action (select Start Date and End Date), then format them with a Format Date action set to “short” time style.

After the Repeat, add Combine Text with New Lines as the separator. This merges your individual meeting lines into one block.

Step 4: Find the gaps.

This is the step that makes the Shortcut actually useful instead of just decorative. Most people skip it. I almost did.

After the Repeat block, I use a second pass through the events with another Repeat with Each. For each event, I compare its start time to the previous event’s end time using Get Time Between Dates (set to Minutes). If the gap is 45 minutes or longer, I flag it in a text variable as a deep work window.

The output looks something like:

## Open Windows
- 45 min gap: 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM
- 90 min gap: 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

On a heavy meeting day, those gaps are the only time I’ll get real work done. Seeing them listed out means I don’t waste them wondering what to do next.

Step 5: Create the note.

Add a Create Note action. Set the folder to wherever you keep daily notes (I use a “Daily” folder in Apple Notes). Paste in your assembled text from the previous steps.

That’s it. One tap, and I’m looking at my entire day in one place.

What Broke (and How I Fixed It)

This Shortcut ran perfectly for two weeks, then silently failed. It was still creating the note, but the meeting list was wrong. Some days had missing events. Took me a while to figure out why.

The culprit: all-day events. If you have a birthday, a holiday, or an all-day reminder on your calendar, Find Calendar Events pulls those too. They don’t have meaningful start and end times, so they throw off the gap calculations and clutter the meeting list.

The fix: add a filter condition to exclude all-day events. In the Find Calendar Events action, add “Is All Day is No.” Two words. Fixed everything.

Shortcut 2: “Prep This One” (Saves ~8 Minutes)

I don’t run this one automatically. I trigger it when I see a meeting coming up in the next 30 minutes that involves three or more people.

One-on-ones don’t need prep notes. Two-person syncs are casual. But the moment there are three people in a room (virtual or not), the meeting has enough complexity that walking in without preparation is how you end up sitting there for 45 minutes contributing nothing.

This Shortcut creates a prep note from the calendar event, with the attendee list already filled in and three questions I force myself to answer before the meeting starts.

How to Build It

Step 1: Choose the meeting.

Add a Find Calendar Events action. Set the filter to Start Date is in the next 2 hours, and sort by Start Date ascending. Then add a Choose from List action so you can pick which meeting you’re prepping for. On days with back-to-back calls, this matters.

Step 2: Pull the details.

Add Get Details of Calendar Events and select Title. Add another one and select Attendees. Add a third and select Start Date, then format it with Format Date (short date and time style).

The Attendees action returns a list of email addresses by default. If you want names instead of emails, you’ll need to cross-reference against Contacts using a Find Contacts action filtered by email. I do this because seeing “Marcus, Dana, Christine” is more useful than seeing three @company.com addresses. But the Contacts lookup adds a few seconds of processing time, so skip it if you don’t mind emails.

Step 3: Build the prep note.

Add a Text action with your template. Mine looks like this:

# Prep: [Title]
**When:** [Formatted Date]
**With:** [Attendee Names]
## Before I Walk In
- What do I need from this meeting?
- What might they need from me?
- What's the one thing I don't want to leave without saying?
## Notes
(during/after)

Those three questions aren’t about the meeting’s agenda. They’re about my role in the meeting. That reframe was the thing that made meeting prep feel useful instead of bureaucratic. I used to write agendas. Nobody read them, including me. These three questions take 90 seconds to answer and they change how I show up.

Step 4: Create the note and set a reminder.

Add a Create Note action, pointed at your meeting notes folder.

Then add an Add New Reminder action. Set the title to something like “Prep: [Meeting Title]” and the remind-me date to 5 minutes before the meeting start time (use Adjust Date to subtract 5 minutes from the event’s start). This is the nudge that makes you actually open the prep note before the meeting, not after.

The Part Nobody Tells You

The attendee list only works if the calendar invite has attendees attached. If someone set up the meeting as a simple calendar block without invitees (which happens more often than you’d think), the Attendees field comes back empty. The Shortcut still works. You just get a “With: (none listed)” line that you can fill in manually. Not elegant, but not a dealbreaker.

Shortcut 3: “Three Things” (Saves ~5 Minutes)

This one doesn’t run in the morning. It runs around 5:30 p.m., right before I close my laptop. But it saves morning time, which is the part that confused me when I first built it.

Here’s why: before this Shortcut existed, I started every Monday with a vague sense of what happened last week and spent 15 to 20 minutes reconstructing it during my Friday review. Five days of work, reconstructed from memory and calendar entries. I’d miss things. I’d forget a decision that mattered. The review felt unreliable, so I’d skip it, and then the next week started fuzzy.

“Three Things” fixed this by making the review note write itself over the course of the week. Every evening, three prompts. Every Friday, the note is already there.

How to Build It

Step 1: Get the week number.

Add Get Current Date, then Format Date with a custom format string. Use the format yyyy-'W'ww to get something like "2026-W23." This becomes the identifier for your weekly note.

Step 2: Find or create the weekly note.

Add a Find Notes action. Set the filter: Name Contains [your formatted week string]. This looks for an existing note with this week’s identifier in the title.

Add an If action: if the result Has Any Value, you’ve already got a weekly note. If not, create one with Create Note, titled something like “Week of 2026-W23” in your preferred folder.

This is the key design choice. The Shortcut appends to the same note all week. You don’t end up with five separate daily logs. By Friday, one note contains the full week.

Step 3: Ask for three things.

Add three Ask for Input actions, each with a different prompt:

1. “What’s one thing you finished today?”
2. “What’s one thing that’s carrying over to tomorrow?”
3. “What’s one decision or conversation that mattered?”

That third question is the one I almost removed because it felt pretentious. It turned out to be the most useful. Decisions are the things I forget fastest. A week later I can usually remember what I did, but not what I decided or agreed to in a meeting. Logging it the same day, when it’s still fresh, has saved me more than once.

Step 4: Timestamp and append.

Add a Format Date action for the current date and time (short style for both). Then add a Text action that assembles the three answers with the timestamp:

### [Today's Date]
- Done: [Answer 1]
- Carrying: [Answer 2]
- Decided: [Answer 3]

Finally, add an Append to Note action, pointed at the note you found or created in Step 2.

Done. Thirty seconds. The prompts feel almost too simple, but that’s exactly why I’ve done them every workday for nine months. If they asked for more, I’d skip them.

Why Voice Input Makes This Better

I started typing my answers into the prompts. It was fine but it felt like homework at 5:30 p.m. Then I started using Superwhisper to dictate them instead. Superwhisper runs on-device, transcribes in real time, and drops the text wherever your cursor is. So I trigger the Shortcut, the prompt appears, I say “Finished the Q3 slide deck, sent it to Marcus” out loud, and the text fills in.

It takes about 15 seconds total for all three prompts. And the answers are more honest when I say them out loud instead of typing. Typing invites editing. Speaking invites the first thing that comes to mind, which is usually the right thing.

A Faster Way to Trigger All of This

You can run these Shortcuts from the Shortcuts app, but opening the app is its own friction. I trigger mine through Raycast instead. ⌘Space, type the first few letters of the Shortcut name, hit Enter. The Shortcut runs without me ever leaving whatever app I'm in.

If you don’t use Raycast, there are other options. You can add Shortcuts to your Dock, pin them as a widget on your Home Screen, or set them up as menu bar items. The point is to make running them feel like a reflex, not a task. If you have to go find the Shortcut, you’ll eventually stop running it.

What I’d Build Next (If You Want to Go Further)

Once you’ve run a few Shortcuts daily for a couple of months, you’ll start seeing patterns that suggest new ones. A few ideas I’ve been testing, none of which require scripting:

A “Focus Session” Shortcut that sets a Focus Mode, opens a specific app, and starts a timer. Three actions, one tap. The trick is making it also turn off after a set duration so you don’t forget.

A “Weekly Digest” Shortcut that takes your “Three Things” note and reformats it into a summary you can paste into a Friday standup or a status update. This is just text manipulation, no APIs.

A “What Happened Yesterday?” Shortcut for mornings when you’ve forgotten what you did. Pulls yesterday’s calendar events and yesterday’s entries from the weekly note. Useful after a long weekend.

All of these use the same building blocks: Find, Format, Text, Create/Append. Once you’ve built the three main Shortcuts, these feel like variations, not new projects.

The Honest Caveats

Shortcuts has bugs. The Find Calendar Events action occasionally returns duplicates. The Append to Note action sometimes adds an extra blank line. The If action’s “Has Any Value” check can behave strangely with empty lists. None of these are dealbreakers, but they’ll frustrate you the first time they happen. The fix is almost always to add a Count action before the If and check whether the count is greater than zero, rather than relying on “Has Any Value.”

These aren’t for everyone. If you work in a role where every day is genuinely unpredictable (emergency response, breaking news, early-stage startup chaos), a structured morning briefing won’t match your reality. These Shortcuts assume your days have some recurring structure, even if the details change.

The time savings are approximate. I measured 25 minutes because that’s what my pre-Shortcuts orientation took. Your number might be 10 minutes, or it might be 40. The savings scale with how many meetings you have and how many apps you currently check manually before starting work.

The Part That Surprised Me

I expected the “What’s Today?” Shortcut to be the most valuable because it saved the most time. It’s not. “Three Things” is.

The daily briefing is useful, but it’s a convenience. It saves me from doing something I could do manually. “Three Things” changed what I’m able to do. Before it, my weekly reviews were shallow reconstructions. Now they’re based on what I actually thought mattered each day, captured while it was still fresh.

The best Shortcut isn’t the one that does the most. It’s the one that feeds something you’d never maintain by hand. For me, that turned out to be a 30-second end-of-day prompt that quietly builds the note I need on Friday.

If you try one thing from this post, try that one. Build it in five minutes, run it for two weeks, and see whether your Fridays feel different.

Marketing ops by day, workflow nerd by night (and most early mornings). I write about Apple tools, productivity systems, and the setups that actually survive a real workweek. No affiliate links, no sponsorships; just apps I pay for and opinions I’ve earned the hard way. ✌️