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:
I’m really proud of my new 2025 Home Office and the way it converts to a recording studio. However, as I was using it I saw some things that needed improving. As a Shortcuts user I like to automate more stuff to make sure I can switch on or off things in the easiest way possible. For that, I needed to use NFC tags and connect some additional lights to Apple Home using the app called Homebridge. Here goes:
It’s been almost a decade since I started journaling regularly and I’ve been tweaking my way of doing it almost every year. Today I’m happy to walk you through my latest version of Journaling Shortcut which has been years in the making. If you ever thought about starting journaling, today is the day. Get the free iOS/Mac Shortcut below and start your daily journaling practice like me. You’ll feel better, you’ll be more productive and you’ll act with more clarity every single day.
On my #iPadOnly journey I keep making lots of Shortcuts to improve my work on the iPad. Sometimes I need to manipulate images or photos. Here’s a handy Shortcut for it:
When you’re working online like I do (“I write random stuff on the Internet”, after all) very often you have to copy and paste links. Also their titles. To make it easy, I decided to create a simple Shortcut that will get the title automatically for me. Feel free to use it, too:
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:
