I’ve recently deleted YouTube and Instagram, and now only use them on my computer. As a result I have been picking up my phone and then doing nothing a lot more, so I figure I’d try to automate away as many things as I can to reduce the number of things I need to do on my phone.

I categorize these automations and shortcuts into three types:

  1. Settings, i.e., things you can do in the Settings app in iOS 26
  2. App Automatic Notifications, i.e., things that apps let you do
  3. Shortcuts/Automations, i.e., things in the Shortcuts app.

The productivity apps that I use (and follow) are:

  1. Habo [GitHub Link]
  2. Data Jar [Link]
  3. Focus Friend [Link]
  4. Default Apple Shortcuts App

Settings Automations

  1. Night shift (warm colors) auto scheduled from 9 PM to 7 AM. Just to reduce eye strain or smth like that.

App Automatic Notifications

  1. Habo prompts me to check my habits every night.

Shortcuts/Automations

Automatically prompt me for my daily Snapstreak and Duolingo streaks.

At 12 AM, I have an automation to reset the snap and Duolingo streak booleans in Data Jar.

Then, I have automations that run whenever I close Snapchat/Duolingo:

  1. [Data Jar] Get Value for Habits.duolingo/snapstreak
  2. If [select var from prev thing], stop this shortcut
  3. End If
  4. Choose from Menu: “Did you extend your streak?”
  • Yes:
    • Text “True”,
    • [Data Jar] Set Value for Habits.duolingo/snapstreak to the Text above
  • No:
  • End Menu

While building this, I was prompting Google Gemini to figure out how to make these shortcuts (in fact, Gemini told me about Data Jar) and I found out that Duolingo has APIs for all users at https://www.duolingo.com/users/[YOUR USERNAME HERE]. Thankfully, it seems like you have to be logged in to access the data, which is a mountain of JSON.

Study

I use Focus Friend because I like the little bean and the house, and also because Hank Green is pretty cool (grew up watching Crash Course).

So the gist is I saw this Instagram Reel [Link] talking about how chillin for a bit before you study makes you better somehow. So I made a shortcut that’s on my home screen:

  1. Show alert “Close your eyes and breathe”
  2. wait for 120 seconds
  3. Vibrate the device
  4. turn on Personal Focus mode to silence a lot of notifs while I’m locked in
  5. open Focus Friend

Bored?

To give me something to click on when I’m truly bored, the shortcut does the following:

  1. [Data Jar] Get Value for Habits.snapstreak
  2. If not snapstreak, Show alert “Send a snap!” and open Snapchat
  3. [Data Jar] Get Value for Habits.duolingo
  4. If not snapstreak, Show alert “Do some Duolingo!” and open Duolingo
  5. Choose from Menu: Practice Something!
  • play cryptograms (c.f. Codebusters, Science Olympiad days)
  • Open the relevant note to practice things that I want to learn