How I set up iOS Shortcuts for my Obsidian

It's been over half a year since I started my journey with Obsidian. It's been a fantastic experience, It has significantly boosted my daily productivity, bringing a new level of organisation to my life. The flexibility Obsidian offers with Markdown, along with its community plug-ins, are stand-out features that I believe everyone should know about.

In this article, I'm going to share how I've tailored my iOS shortcuts to take notes & track my to-do's in Obsidian, a system that has been working brilliantly for me for over 2 months now. I discovered this setup through the r/Obsidian subreddit, and it's been a game-changer.

My Obsidian setup

First, In order to demonstrate what i have tried to achieve with iOS Shortcuts, This is how my Obisidan is currently set up:

I create Weekly notes with periodic notes plugin & templater plugin
In weekly notes, my tasks (past due/due today/ due this week) is appeared from obsidian-task plugin & dataview plugins
Obisidian is stored via iCloud for sync with my iPhone & Mac

My behaviour for productivity

Whenever i think of a thing to do, i put it in my weekly note with due date
Random thoughts to be taken also in weekly note
A note for Grocery list to do grocery shopping every weekend for a week (simple to-do format)
A content list note to remember Contents idea from random thoughts

The Challenge I Faced

Secondly, let's explore the problem at hand and what I sought to resolve. I was happy with the idea of a weekly note featuring my to-do list, but I encountered a hitch.

Whenever a new to-do item or a random thought poped up, or when I needed to update my grocery list, I had to launch the Obsidian app on my iPhone. This process, which takes a while, required me to click on the weekly note and type - [ ] .... This proved to be a cumbersome task for such small to-dos, and I started skipping note-taking altogether, leading me back to dis-organization.

Thus, I found myself in search of a quicker way to access my Obsidian notes and jot down thoughts on the fly. That's when I discovered Shortcuts!

Apple Shortcuts

Shortcuts is a visual scripting application developed by Apple, available across the Apple ecosystem (Mac, iPhone, etc.). I was astounded that I hadn't explored this feature before! It was the perfect blend of automation and self-scripting power, coupled with the flexibility of Obsidian!

My Shortcuts 1. a To-do into weekly note

to-do1

You can easily input your to-do list by clicking shortcuts, add them without opening Obisidian.

to-do1

I ask for text with "What is your to-do?"
I take 'tomorrow' variable in order to inject as data (I use obsidian-task plugin and sort by due date)
the text including -[] and #task together with tomorrow's date as a due and current date is captured
Add the captured text into the path YYYY/YYYY-[W]ww as a new line (I use periodic notes plugin to set up my weekly note)

My Shortcuts 2. Grocery idea into grocery note

grocery1

Same logic here and simpler than to-do list. simple text injection into the static file.