After a meeting with someone new yesterday, I realized there was a few places where I could have used the Shortcuts app to speed up the processes around our encounter.

Before the meeting, I was headed somewhere new and needed to figure out how to get there on time.

During the meeting, I was fumbling with my phone a bit, handing it to them to type in their contact information, and didn’t have an easy way to share mine either. Plus, I dealt with everything after the meeting too – writing down notes, sharing my info, and following up later.

From all this, I noticed a few repeating patterns, that could be automated using mostly default apps – the data I need already exists or can be entered on the fly.

So, I came up with a few jobs to be done:

Knowing when to leave to get to the meeting on time

Getting directions to the meeting when it’s time to leave

Sharing your “business card” contact information

Logging someone else’s contact information

Taking helpful meeting notes afterwards

Following up with them the same day (or later)

Scheduling that follow up if it’s not today

The Shortcuts app already has access to your Calendar events, Reminders, Maps, and Travel Time.

Plus, using the Scripting actions, you can structure a series of prompts for yourself to follow and enter information as the shortcut is running – perfect for this in-the-moment type of situation.

Naturally, I got to work building custom shortcuts in the Shortcuts app for each of these – here’s what I came up with:

Plus, just to be fancy, I combined these shortcuts into one master shortcut that includes the action steps from all 7 options underneath a Choose From Menu action.

New Contact Meeting Utility:

This lets you pick what you want to first, then proceeds as if you were running each of these shortcuts.



If you want all the functionality in one go, get the shortcut here.

These 7, er, 8 shortcuts were fun to build, useful to almost any working professional, and taught me a few things along the way.

If you have any other ideas on business-related shortcuts, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. Otherwise, check out each of the shortcuts below and examine how they work – there’s tons of different techniques in here, so it’s worth a look at how I built these.

Get all the shortcuts: