{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"Chris Krycho - notes","link":"http:\/\/v4.chriskrycho.com\/","description":{},"lastBuildDate":"Fri, 14 Dec 2018 22:15:00 -0500","item":[{"title":"Hey Siri, Record a Zettel","link":"http:\/\/v4.chriskrycho.com\/2018\/hey-siri-record-a-zettel.html","description":"

Assumed Audience:<\/a><\/b> people interested in reading, writing, learning, and research systems\u2014particularly on iOS, and particularly with automation in view.<\/i><\/p>\n

A few evenings ago, I spent a little while building out some Siri Shortcuts to make the process of building out notes in my Zettelkasten<\/a> on the fly easier. Building them in Bear is easy enough<\/em>, but it\u2019s even nicer to just be able to tap a button and have things like the date auto-generated for the note title in exactly the format I want: YYYY.MM.DD.HHMM<\/code>, like 2018.12.14.2205<\/code> for a note created on December 14, 2018, at 10:05 pm.<\/p>\n

This timestamp format means I can always find notes by when they were written, and it\u2019s easy to sort them by when I created them, which in turn seems the kind of thing that will prove helpful in the long-term, given how much our memories are associative<\/em>. (This insight is not original<\/a> by any means, but it\u2019s something I\u2019ve long valued in my work<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

So having a little tool that handles that part automatically is great<\/em>. The other thing that\u2019s nice about using shortcuts is that I can use them in a hands-free context. I can now just say, \u201cHey Siri, record a new Zettel\u201d and (since Shortcut configurations are shared across my iCloud account), I can do the whole process without typing a thing. Tagging is a bit harder here, but I can do well enough (it helps that I enunciate extremely<\/em> clearly).<\/p>\n

One thing I wish is that iOS had support for doing these kinds of things when in do-not-disturb mode when driving. That\u2019s the time when my \u201crecord a new Zettel\u201d Siri Shortcut would be most<\/em> handy, and it\u2019s not available. I\u2019d be perfectly fine with having to come back and do a bit of cleanup later to get it just right<\/em>, as long as I could get the thought down somewhere I could come back to it later. You can do things like say \u201cHey Siri, in Bear, add a note,\u201d and Siri will prompt you for its content\u2014so clearly the functionality is there. SiriKit just needs to better support it.<\/p>\n

As for these particular shortcuts: I\u2019m still working out the kinks, but for what it\u2019s worth, here are the shortcuts I\u2019ve built so far:<\/p>\n