After a little Googling, I could just define the date and adjust it directly inside this shortcut. Turns out, that whole rigmarole wasn’t actually necessary. From there, I could add an instruction to the BackNotes workflow to run the MonthAgo shortcut first, then pass that adjusted date into the Find Notes action. At first, I actually created a separate shortcut called “MonthAgo” that takes the current date and subtracts 30 days from it. And right off the bat, you have a few different ways to pull this off. First, we check today’s date and dial it back 30 days to make sure nothing relatively new and necessary gets caught in the net. The logic here is pretty straightforward. Meet BackupNotes: It’s the first half-decent Shortcut I ever made, and as the name implies, it’s meant to help you quickly save your old notes in the cloud before you go through and start cleaning house. Piecing together complex actions to help clean out our devices involves a lot of trial and error at first, so let’s work through a basic example. Don’t worry: As long as your iPad and iPhone are signed into the same Apple ID, any Shortcut you create on one will be visible in the other. Since there’s no Shortcuts functionality available on Apple’s Macs - even the new ones running the iPhone-inspired M1 chipset - that means use an iPad if you have one. Oh, and for the sake of your sanity, it’s best to start piecing together Shortcuts on as big a screen as possible. Granted, there are a handful of third-party apps, like Toolbox Pro, Data Jar and Jell圜uts, that dramatically expand on the Shortcut tools that ship in iOS, but the thing to remember is that there are some tasks you can’t pull off with Shortcuts yet. As you’ll see later, Apple also has a fairly limited set of tools for interacting with files stored directly on your iOS device. Similarly, there doesn’t appear to be a way - for now, at least - to figure out the last time you used certain apps, so there’s no way to build a Shortcut that highlights apps you could delete without missing them. I would love to create a Shortcut that would automatically dismiss notifications generated more than a day or two ago, but Apple doesn’t make information about a notification’s age available to Shortcuts. Let’s say you’re like me, and you’re just awful at remembering to clear out your notifications regularly. There are, of course, limits to what Apple will let you do. You know the result you’re looking for - it’s just a matter of thinking through the steps and finding the right sequence of actions to get you there. More than anything, I’ve come to think of these things as little logic puzzles. All it really takes is a little time to put all the pieces together. Building your first Shortcut can seem daunting at first, but relax: You don’t need to be a coder to create a truly useful setup.
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