Most seamless way of Apple Watch as capture tool?

baseball98

Registered
Hi all,

Recently purchased an Apple Watch Cellular and want to use it as a capture tool for Todoist. Any ideas on the best way? Have played around with shortcuts without success but basically, what I would like is to create a command with Siri saying:

"Hey Siri add Fix the garage door to Todoist" and then the task "Fix the Garage door" would show up in my Todoist inbox.
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Any ideas?
 

snfuod

Registered
I have no experience with Todoist, but in other well known apps there is usually a way to make the app get reminders from Apples reminders. I then simply raise my Apple Watch, say "Remind me to... X or Y" and then the reminder is captured in Apple reminders and from there synced into my app of choice in the background. Pretty seamless I think.
 

baseball98

Registered
Um, like this?


See also

Thanks! But the Todoist app on the AW is not working very good, unfortunately - and does not have good support with Siri. The "Hey Siri, add a task called 'Clean the Garage' to Todoist" for example works fine on iPhone, but just renders a "Can't do that on the Apple Watch" on the watch.

The best way I found so far is to create a contact called Todoist, and assigned the Todoist Inbox e-mail address to this contact, then via the Apple Watch and Siri command it through "Hey Siri, send an e-mail to Todoist with Clean the garage in subject and garage in body" and then confirm I want to send it but it is still one step to far.

What really annoys me is that there is a iOS Reminders to Todoist IFTTT applet that is perfect as it copies all the reminders that I create as tasks to Todoist which would be perfect, but the applet triggers only when I open the IFTTT app and doesn't run in the background, an issue a lot of people seem to have with IFTTT.
 

baseball98

Registered
I have no experience with Todoist, but in other well known apps there is usually a way to make the app get reminders from Apples reminders. I then simply raise my Apple Watch, say "Remind me to... X or Y" and then the reminder is captured in Apple reminders and from there synced into my app of choice in the background. Pretty seamless I think.
How do you mean "synced to my app of choice in the bacground" are you also referring to a IFTTT applet? I am now experimenting with Shortcuts and perhaps I have found a solution, TBC...
 

snfuod

Registered
How do you mean "synced to my app of choice in the bacground" are you also referring to a IFTTT applet? I am now experimenting with Shortcuts and perhaps I have found a solution, TBC...

I'm referring to Things 3 and Omnifocus 3 and a setting they have to automatically import reminders from Apple reminders. Maybe there are more applications out there that has a setting like that.

A while ago I was experimenting with using only Apple reminders and forgot I had Omnifocus importing from reminders. I kept writing stuff in one of the lists I made, and they kept disappearing. Scratched my head there for a while before realizing where they went. Also suddenly had a pretty filled up inbox in Omnifocus.

Good luck on your experiments. I'm sure you will figure out a smooth way for capturing.
 

baseball98

Registered
Found the solution!

I capture in the Apple Watch with ios Reminder app. "Hey Siri - remind me to pick up laundry". This creates a reminder and is synced with my iPhone. In the iPhone, I have created a shortcut with ios Shortcuts that gets the top 1 reminder, sends it automatically as an email with the reminder title as subject to my Todoist Inbox, and then completes the reminder in the iPhone. After this I set up a Shortcut Automation to run every hour, to actually trigger the shortcut.

The limit of 1 reminder makes sure that there is one e-mail per reminder chosen. This is the only not so clever part. If I would have 12 reminders then it would take over 1 day for all of these to be exported, but the volume is rather low so this works for me. If this becomes a problem, you can just set up the shortcut to be automated every 30 minutes or every 10 minutes throughout the day or very frequent at specific time.

Screenshot below. (Nirvana is just the name of the contact that I created for the Todoist Inbox e-mail address. My favorite band, has nothing to do with the GTD Software :) Posting here for future reference of AW as capture tool.

shortcutz.jpg
 

Julie Jones

Registered
I had very poor results trying to integrate apple reminders and a list manager app.
I find that with Nirvana, I can use Siri and email to add something to my inbox. It works with my phone or an Apple watch. It is slightly more complicated than "Hey Siri remind me..." but "Hey Siri, email Nirvana ..." is still pretty easy.
 

baseball98

Registered
I had very poor results trying to integrate apple reminders and a list manager app.
I find that with Nirvana, I can use Siri and email to add something to my inbox. It works with my phone or an Apple watch. It is slightly more complicated than "Hey Siri remind me..." but "Hey Siri, email Nirvana ..." is still pretty easy.
But have you managed to get Siri to send an e-mail without any additional input needed but a single Siri command?
 

Julie Jones

Registered
But have you managed to get Siri to send an e-mail without any additional input needed but a single Siri command?
So far I still have to say yes to "ready to send", but everything else is one sentence.

I just checked and it looks like for the watch that when you lower your wrist it will send without you having to confirm.
 

baseball98

Registered
OK - depends on the volume of course, but my way described above is just one sentence. "Remind me to invite Carol to the wedding" and it's done.
 

James M

Registered
Found the solution!

I capture in the Apple Watch with ios Reminder app. "Hey Siri - remind me to pick up laundry". This creates a reminder and is synced with my iPhone. In the iPhone, I have created a shortcut with ios Shortcuts that gets the top 1 reminder, sends it automatically as an email with the reminder title as subject to my Todoist Inbox, and then completes the reminder in the iPhone. After this I set up a Shortcut Automation to run every hour, to actually trigger the shortcut.

The limit of 1 reminder makes sure that there is one e-mail per reminder chosen. This is the only not so clever part. If I would have 12 reminders then it would take over 1 day for all of these to be exported, but the volume is rather low so this works for me. If this becomes a problem, you can just set up the shortcut to be automated every 30 minutes or every 10 minutes throughout the day or very frequent at specific time.

Screenshot below. (Nirvana is just the name of the contact that I created for the Todoist Inbox e-mail address. My favorite band, has nothing to do with the GTD Software :) Posting here for future reference of AW as capture tool.

View attachment 1205
Hey @baseball98 - I'm really interested in setting this up, but I'm getting stuck on how to schedule iOS to run an Automation every hour. I can only see an option for Daily / Weekly / Monthly under "Time of Day". Really grateful for your help!
 

baseball98

Registered
Hey @baseball98 - I'm really interested in setting this up, but I'm getting stuck on how to schedule iOS to run an Automation every hour. I can only see an option for Daily / Weekly / Monthly under "Time of Day". Really grateful for your help!

Yes unfortunately the only option, and this is for all automations, is to create 1 automation daily @8, another one daily @9 and so on. Takes a few minutes to set up but well worth it, and every hour for me is a bit much I could do with every three hours or so if needed.
 

James M

Registered
Yes unfortunately the only option, and this is for all automations, is to create 1 automation daily @8, another one daily @9 and so on. Takes a few minutes to set up but well worth it, and every hour for me is a bit much I could do with every three hours or so if needed.
Ah, got it - I'll give that a try, thank you.
 

baseball98

Registered
I think I have also updated the Shortcut with an IF statement to ignore Reminders without content, otherwise the Shortcut will start sending empty tasks to Todoist if there are none, try to figure it out as it is a great way to learn Shortcuts :)
 

James M

Registered
I’ve done something slightly different - no limit on how many fetched and used a “Repeat for each item” loop —
 

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pjaugust

Registered
I'd recommend checking out Drafts.app - probably one of the best capture tools for Apple watch.

They also have ios apps, a Mac app, and a limited browser plugin.
 

baseball98

Registered
I'd recommend checking out Drafts.app - probably one of the best capture tools for Apple watch.

They also have ios apps, a Mac app, and a limited browser plugin.
Really like the idea of the app and it looks solid. I never take any lengthy notes so for me the option doesn't change anything but I would imagine the additional features would come in handy for a lot of people.

TLDR: To me, commanding my Apple Watch "Hey Siri - remind me to call Josh about trip" and voilá - it is automatically in my Todoist Inbox, is the least friction way I can imagine to capture.
 

Matth8346

Registered
I don't use it often but I purchased Braintoss ($2.99) which comes with a Watch app. You can set it to go to your email, or the email address of your list manager's inbox if your app has that feature. It's useful when I need it.
 
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