I've been experimenting with the Shortcuts app to find ways to automate some of my repeated tasks.

And my latest experiment has been to improve how I collect articles for reading later.

I've been saving links to a list by sharing a link from Safari with the Reminders app and choosing the relevant list to add this item to:

While this was enough to make a browsable reading list, I wanted to make my article-picking process easier by adding a short summary to each reading list item.

This summary would give me a gist of the article, and I can choose whether to read it now or later or remove it from the list.

I knew we could use actions from the ChatGPT app to run AI prompts in a shortcut, so I made the following shortcut:

With this shortcut, I get an option added to the iOS share sheet where I can save links for reading later:

Tapping this Read Later option gets the article's content, passes it through ChatGPT to get a 2-liner summary, and saves it in my reading list in the Reminders app. The 2-liner summary gets added to the Notes field of the new task.

So, in a couple of taps, I have links neatly saved on my reading list with a short summary that helps me peek into the article even before opening the link:

I save these links to a list in the Reminders app because I use it for managing tasks and all collected items, but you can swap out the last step in the shortcut to save links to Todoist, Apple Notes or any other app you use.

Give this shortcut a try if you use an iPhone and have ChatGPT installed on your phone.

Now, if, like me, you enjoy living a life of less hustle and more time to do what you love, you might find Rishi's newsletter and work interesting.

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