Apple Shortcuts for Normal People: 10 Automations You'll Actually Use

Shortcuts is the app everyone owns and nobody opens. It came preinstalled, it wears a vaguely threatening icon full of coloured squares, and the first time most people tap it they’re met with a gallery of automations for smart-home gear they don’t own and “workflows” they can’t parse. So they close it and never return. That’s a genuine shame, because under the intimidating presentation sits the most quietly useful app Apple ships — provided you stop trying to build clever things and start building boring, repetitive ones. The best shortcut isn’t impressive. It’s the one that saves you four taps you do every single day.

I’m not going to teach you to program. Every shortcut below either already exists in the Gallery or takes under two minutes to assemble by tapping actions into a list. What matters more than the building is knowing the four ways a shortcut can start, because that’s what turns a neat trick into something that actually fires at the right moment.

How a shortcut actually runs

A shortcut is just a saved sequence of actions. The interesting question is what sets it off, and there are four answers worth knowing.

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The Home Screen tap is for things you do deliberately — give the shortcut an icon and it sits there like any app. The Share Sheet is the secret weapon: build a shortcut that accepts photos or web pages, and it appears in the share menu of every app, ready to act on whatever you’re looking at. Personal Automations are the self-starting kind — they fire on a time, a location, a charger, a connection, with no tap at all. And Siri runs any shortcut by name, hands-free. Keep those four in mind and the ten below click into place.

The ten I’d actually set up

I’ve thrown out the show-off shortcuts and kept the ones with staying power — the ones still on my phone a year later because they remove real friction. Here’s the table, then a few that deserve a sentence more.

A few of these earn extra explanation.

Directions Home (number 1) sounds trivial until you’ve used it. One tap and Maps is already routing you home from wherever you are — no typing your own address into a phone while standing in a car park. Build it from the Get Directions action with your home set as the destination, drop it on your Home Screen, done. The same pattern makes a Directions to Work twin.

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Running Late (number 2) is the one people thank me for. It grabs your current driving time to a contact’s location, drops it into a pre-written message — “On my way, about 20 minutes” — and texts them, all from one tap while you’re still locking the front door. No fumbling, no typing while walking.

Battery Saver and Wind Down (3 and 4) are automations, meaning they run with no input from you. The first flips on Low Power Mode the moment your battery hits 30 percent, squeezing extra hours out of a bad day without waiting for the system’s own 20-percent nag. The second is a bedtime routine: at, say, 22:30 it switches on your Sleep Focus, dims the screen, and starts whatever white noise or playlist sends you off — the phone quietly putting itself to bed so you remember to as well.

HEIC to JPG and Make PDF (6 and 7) live in the Share Sheet, which is where Shortcuts goes from neat to indispensable. Select some photos, hit share, tap your shortcut, and out comes a JPG you can send to the one relative whose ancient laptop can’t open Apple’s format — or a single tidy PDF of a receipt, a recipe, or a web page. No extra app, no upload, no account. It happens on the phone, instantly.

Quick Timer and Add to List (8 and 9) are the unglamorous workhorses. A named timer — “Pasta, 11 minutes” — sitting on your Home Screen means you stop dictating the same request to Siri every time you cook; one tap and it’s counting down. Add to List appends whatever you give it to a single running note, so a tapped share from a recipe or a quick line of text lands in the same place every time, instead of scattered across reminders, notes, and messages you send to yourself. Neither is clever. Both delete a tiny daily friction, and that’s the whole test a shortcut has to pass to deserve a spot on your phone. If you build only two things from this entire list, I’d put money on these being the pair you reach for without thinking by the end of the week.

Letting them run themselves

The shortcuts that change your habits aren’t the ones you tap — they’re the ones you forget exist because they just happen. That’s the Automation tab at the bottom of the Shortcuts app. Tap it, hit the plus, choose Create Personal Automation, and you’re offered a long menu of triggers: a time of day, arriving at or leaving a place, connecting to CarPlay or a particular Wi-Fi network, plugging in a charger, opening or closing a specific app, the battery crossing a level, a Focus turning on. Pick a trigger, add the actions, and crucially toggle Run Immediately so it fires silently instead of nagging you to confirm.

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That last setting is what separates a real automation from an annoying one. Car Audio (number 5) only works because it runs the instant CarPlay connects — your podcast starts as you reverse off the drive, no tap required. Scroll Check (number 10) is my favourite piece of mild self-sabotage: when Instagram or TikTok opens, it silently starts a 15-minute timer, so when the timer chirps you actually notice you’ve been scrolling, instead of surfacing forty minutes later wondering where the evening went. It doesn’t lock you out or lecture you. It just taps you on the shoulder.

Start with one, not ten

If this list has you tempted to spend an evening building all ten at once, don’t — that’s how Shortcuts ends up abandoned again. Pick the single one that maps to a thing you genuinely do every day. For most people that’s Directions Home or Running Late; set up that one, use it for a week, and let it prove its worth before you build another. The whole point of Shortcuts isn’t to feel clever or to automate your house into a sci-fi film. It’s to quietly delete the small, dumb, repetitive taps that make up an embarrassing amount of how we use these phones. Start with one boring shortcut that saves you four taps a day, and you’ll go looking for the next one yourself — which is exactly how the app everyone ignores becomes the one you can’t believe you lived without.