Hi all - I’m a high school teacher and relatively new to the MPU community! Since joining, I’ve really started to reflect on my workflows, and how I can utilize my Mac to more effectively enhance my productivity. Given my job, there is a ton of donkey work that I think can be easily delegated to shortcuts or various macros to clear my plate for the more engaging deep work.
For my first real workflow automation, I started super simple. My calendar is the bane of my existence with sporadic, irregular meetings cropping up throughout each week during my lunch and prep periods. So, I took Apple’s premade “Morning Summary” shortcut, and added a few bells and whistles to force this information in front of my face each morning. Like Apple’s, it still uses Private Cloud Compute to summarize the weather and calendar (with my personal additions of time, location, and details of each event) in plain language. It then creates an automated Obsidian daily note, which springs up when I open my computer for the first time each morning.
Plugins and Bases were super easy to reference in the daily note too, since everything is plain text. So, I put my dataviewjs script showing the time and date, a modified (vibe-coded) version of the Apple Reminders plugin to show my tasks for the day, and a Base table with my upcoming lessons. The shortcut then places the previous day’s note in my burn-bag, since the durable information I need to carry over is referenced from other sources (Apple Reminders or Bases). Now, instead of a static dashboard to work from, I have a dynamic note that serves a deeper use case with less futzing around.
I’ll drop the link here for it:
Morning Summary Robot
Would love to know if there is anything I can add/improve. I know there are a handful of educators here, so if there are any other workflow automations you do in your day-to-day, I’m all ears!