A Shortcut—or collection of Shortcuts—to help you push through a stressful milestone using (short-term) futures thinking.

To help conquer procrastination, I procrastinated studying for my comprehensive exams by developing this Shortcut.

When a stressful milestone's got you down, it can help to think ahead to what life will be like once you're finished with it. Unfortunately, it can be tough to imagine life past the challenge you're facing. This Shortcut externalizes that a little bit. You create a list of the things you're looking forward to once you've shed this burden, and the Shortcut reminds you of one of those future memories (at random) with the tap of a button. You can use this to shake off the doom and gloom and motivate yourself to get your work done.

These Shortcuts require Shortcuts on iOS. To install them, simply download the links on an iOS device and install. Important: you must first go into Settings → Shortcuts and enable the "Allow Untrusted Shortcuts" preference before your device will let you install these.

I mean, the basic edition is simple. List a few nice visions as Text, Split Text by new lines, Get Item from List randomly, and Show Result.

My version is a little fancier. I put my items in a DEVONthink markdown file to make it easy to add to it anywhere, and I used recursion to make it easy to loop. This made it more complicated, of course. There are five (five!) interlocking Shortcuts.

The first part of the "controller". This runs two shortcuts: Get Visualizations to pull the list from the DEVONthink file, and then it runs Recursive Visualization to give me a looping prompt.

The "model". Give it a DEVONthink item link and the markdown heading level of the images of the future in that file, and it feeds that link to a Get list from DEVONthink md headings Shortcut that pulls them into a nice list for you.

This is a helper function I've developed to make it easy to grab headings in a markdown file saved in DEVONthink. I use it elsewhere too. It accepts:

• a Dictionary containing...
  • a Heading value indicating the level of headings you want to parse (in the form of a number of # symbols).
  • a File value in the form of an x-devonthink-item:// link.

It switches that item link into an x-callback-url to, grabs and decodes the text content of the DEVONthink item, grabs each of the appropriate heading lines, cleans the hashtags from each line (so they don't appear in your resulting list), and outputs that final list.

The second part of the "controller". This shortcut receives a list and then runs the Visualizing Positive Futures sub-shortcut (to facilitate recursion). It then offers a simple menu with "Another?" as a prompt, and the options yes or no. If you chose yes, it runs itself again, looping without having to re-do all of the above shortcut actions (speedy!)

The "view". Nice and simple. This shortcut accepts a list, gets a random item, and shows the item as a result.