rusty tools hanging in a wall

This morning’s “putter around before the first meeting” project was to automate a calendar-to-Obsidian note workflow using iOS Shortcuts.

Part of my daily routine involves a review of the day’s meetings and events. I ask myself two prompting questions about each:

  • What is the most important thing about this meeting? That answer can vary. Sometimes it’s about a deliverable or a business outcomes. Sometimes it’s about something some attendees human need.
  • How do you want to show up in this meeting? I have found it very helpful to sit with this question for a minute first thing in the morning.

I keep the meeting notes on the same page where I answer those questions so that I have a reminder in front of me of what I want to accomplish and how I want to show up.

I was doing that on a reMarkable, but I’ve found that handwritten meeting notes don’t really aid retention much, and that it’s better to have searchable text, so I rewrote the automation for Obsidian.

You can grab the workflow and review it.

  • You need to at least have your calendar set up in Apple Calendar.
  • It will ask for the name of the vault you want to store the note in during setup. Don’t worry about spaces: It will URL-encode that.
  • You will need to set which calendar it collects events from (or unset that value in the Find All Calendar Events step of the workflow)
  • It was cheaper and easier to replace colons and slashes in event names than figure out how to encode them to avoid problems with problematic filenames.
  • If you don’t like the prompts I used, the text that drives the content of the page is just plain old Markdown … pretty easy to change them.

TODO: Add a specific folder to put the notes in. For now it drops them in the top level of the vault, which suits my purposes.