Start Your Day Right, Part 3 — Automating the Obsidian Daily Note and Agenda Creation

Today we come to the final installment of our start your day automation within the larger August of Automation 2024 series. In the first part of the Start Your Day Shortcut we built a custom weather forecaster. In the second part we automated a timer for some study time and added in some journaling. In this final part, we’re going to do the activities to start the work portion of the day. Then, we’re going to put all of these shortcuts together into one main shortcut.

In today’s shortcut, I’m going to do the following:

• Check to see if a Daily Note exists in Obsidian
• If none exists, the shortcut will create it
• If one exists or after the shortcut creates the daily note, it will present me with a list of my calendar events so I can create meeting notes for the items on my calendar I want to create notes for.
• Then it opens my Daily Note so I can get started with my day.

This shortcut assumes three things:

1. You use Obsidian
2. You have the Actions for Obsidian app for Shortcuts
3. You use apple’s built in calendar

If you do not use Obsidian, you could open your first app of choice (calendar or mail app or another personal knowledge management app). If you do not want to pay for Actions for Obsidian, you can still do the calendar portion of this…