A Matter of Perspective II: Sort the Day
By using an Apple Shortcut, you can sort the Today list in Things into to-do's that must be done in the morning, and those that are to be done in the evening.
In browsing Cultured Code's social media accounts, I can see that there have been requests for automatic sorting feature for to-do's that must be done in the evening vs. those that must be done in the morning. I want that, too! But how would that be implemented? Should it be only reminders as the basis for sorting? An example: to-do's that have a reminder for 7 AM come before those that have a reminder of 6 PM? Then you find yourself putting reminders all over the place just to accommodate your Today list sorting, which will likely leave you numb to the reminders themselves eventually.
Shortcuts to the Rescue (again).
I have devised a simple to-do naming method that allows for auto sorting in the morning, and using Apple Shortcuts you can sort your day with the touch of a button. Let's dive in.
Parameters
Logically speaking
- Where do you usually start the day? At home, right? Our morning and our evening to-do's will be tagged with Home.
- The names of our to-do's that must be completed in the morning and evening will have either
morningoreveningin the to-do title.
The Shortcut
Using only the Find, Edit Items, and Open Actions in Shortcuts for Things, we can cobble together some auto-sorting, and have your Today list open to filtered items for an easy jump-off point to your day.
Example of some items that you might like to sort:
Complete morning routine
- Walk dogs
- Eat healthy breakfast
- Get washed and dressed
- Write for an hour
Complete evening routine
- Check missed phone calls or texts
- Return calls
- Feed dogs
- Process email inbox
- Check physical mailbox
Write morning emails
Run in the evening
Once you have written your to-do's like this (some might be one-off, some might be repeating but this naming convention will pay off later), you can now set your shortcut up.
Here is a link to the shortcut so that you can simply click this and import it into Apple Shortcuts.
Edit your Today order.
This takes a little front-end setup, but now I sort my day in about 15 seconds, as opposed to dragging tasks up and down and using the When feature for each tag to manually sort them.
You can experiment with this setup of course, to accommodate your own workflows. Questions? Let me know, and good luck!