Hello, I’m Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe - to-do app for business owners and their teams. I write essays, books, work on projects and I podcast for you using #iPadOnly in #NoOffice as I believe that work is not a place you go to, it’s a thing you do.
I love automating stuff on my iPad thanks to the built-in Shortcuts app (previously: Workflow). Here’s the list of my best Shortcuts:
One of the reasons I can be so productive being #iPadOnly is the fact that I use Siri Shortcuts a lot. I have them for Action button, Clipboard management, Notes, Journaling and much more… The problem is that both the Shortcuts app is very poorly written by Apple (crashes, freezes, scrolling issues) and with many iOS updates Apple “upgrades” the way Shortcuts work and suddenly something that used to work, just stops working. Recently this happened to me with my Tinify Shortcut. In iOS18 there was even a bigger change…
When I was doing the migration from my old blog at sliwinski.com to this one, I wanted to make sure this one loads fast also on mobile phones. So I painstakingly compressed all of the images using a free(ish) service called Tinify. I wanted to both have cookie and eat it, so have lower file sizes AND great quality. I automated it using Shortcuts and each image was reduced by between 70%-30% of the original one without visible loss of quality. Here’s how I did it (and no, they are not a sponsor, I just recommend them because I like them).
A few years back I wrote a tutorial how to download videos to the iPad using youtube-dl and a-Shell app but it stopped working because of a court order. Luckily there’s a fork of this called YT-DLP which you can use again. Here’s how it works:
I’ve created a version 2.0 of Nozbe Shortcut to add tasks recently and it’s much more powerful. Here’s what it can do:
Ever since I got the iPhone 15 Pro I’ve been loving the new Action button and I keep inventing ideas how to use it even more. I’ve added many Shortcuts to it, like Journaling, Watch Notes, Dice and others… and recently I came up with a very cool idea - how to finally build my very own Clipboard manager using Shortcuts that takes advantage of the Action button, adds very useful features and the result is… glorious - and you can get it for free below:
Two months ago I posted WatchNote - a Shortcut to add a simple note directly to the Apple Watch which I use with my Ultra’s Action Button. After using it for a while I realized I could do something much more powerful: How about viewing or editing many notes directly from a watch? Well, here it is:
A long time ago I built a page to roll the dice so that I can pull it up and use it when I’m playing games with my daughters and for some reason we have misplaced the dice: michael.team/dice - but recently as I was playing more with Shortcuts I decided to build a Shortcut that could let you roll the dice on your iPhone, iPad, Mac or even an Apple Watch. And here it is:
Last week I posted a very geeky way to add notes to the Apple Watch which required complicated setup to work on my Apple Watch Ultra 2. However, Rafal (the VP of Product in Nozbe) saw that and he told me that by sending iMessages to yourself, you can have a similar workflow without all that complicated server setup.
I love the big screen of my new Apple Watch Ultra 2 and now that I have Action button configured on it, I was thinking of more things I could do with it. I already figured out how to add a task to Nozbe but sometimes I just needed to add a note quickly and later retrieve it, without using my iPhone 15 Pro. Here’s what I came up with:
Recently I got myself the new iPhone 15 Pro and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and these two devices have one thing in common - Action button which can be configurable. In the beginning I changed its settings on the iPhone to just open the camera and on the watch to start a workout, but after a few days my identity as a productivity guy and founder of Nozbe got the better of me. I decided to tweak this with Siri Shortcuts and create my ultimate “Action Button Shortcut” which you can get here free and adjust to your own liking:
