I’ve been writing about Shortcuts I’ve created and what I’m doing with Shortcuts on my Home Screen and Today Screen for the last 3 weeks. I thought I’d continue with the Shortcuts theme this week. I’ve created a simple little Shortcut that allows me to show a little bit of kindness to people in my life that I write to regularly.

The urge to create this Shortcut came from a couple of angles. We are living through a historic moment in time; navigating our way through a pandemic. I want people to know that I am thinking of them, hoping that they are doing well. On my Mac, I have a Keyboard Maestro Shortcut that inserts the following text in to any app I’m using that I can type in, “Hope this note finds you doing well.” I use it when I reach out to the families I’m serving while I teach remotely. I use it when I email people. There are times when I am not sure if I need to write an email, text, or some other form of a message. This is where the Shortcut I’ve titled: Be Kind comes in.

The Shortcut is very simple. As you can see here, there are only 3 actions.

SIDE NOTE: I know that I could use an app like TextExpander to pull this off. I currently don’t use enough “snippets” to warrant a subscription to their service so I am using other things like Keyboard Maestro and Shortcuts. Back to the Shortcut.

The first action is the “Text” action. After selecting this I wrote what I wanted to “populate” in the text field, “Hope this note finds you doing well.” Next, I went to the Apps section of Shortcuts and chose Drafts. Drafts is the app “where text starts” for me. Specifically, text that I am unsure of what it will become. I placed a single Shortcut widget on my Home Screen, in a Drafts stack. Here’s a picture of that widget.

When I initiate the Shortcut, a drop down notifies me that the Draft has been created as shown in this picture.

This is an important step due to the fact that if you do not click the toggle switch “Show When Run,” shown here…

…the Drafts app will open to a blank Draft, not the Draft you created.

After you click “Done” on your Home Screen, the Drafts app opens the “Be Kind” note. From that point, I can continue with what I wanted to write then decide where this text needs to go.