above: A stripped down version of my "Daily Standup" shortcut, featured in Apple's Shortcuts Gallery.

Like a lot of software teams, we have daily stand up meetings at my job. For a while, we were doing these over chat, where we would type up our status as opposed to delivering it verbally over video.

It's a repetitive task when you keep an updated todo list. Stand up is just regurgitating:

  1. The tasks you completed yesterday
  2. The tasks you intend on completing today
  3. The blockers–those tasks you can't get done because someone who isn't you has to do something first, and
  4. Your schedule for the day so people know to get at you when you're free.

Daily stand ups are super useful, but I'm not about to sit down every morning and re-type my to-do list for my team. That's not a good use of my time. You already know where this is going... When we were doing chat stand ups, I wrote a shortcut to do it for me, and published it to RoutineHub in case anybody else wanted to use it. It saved me a bunch of time. It stores the previous day's standup to iCloud drive, and uses that as the starting point for "Yesterday's" tasks. It also integrates with your "Work" Reminders list and pre-populates with pertinent tasks.

That's cool and all, but the reason for this post is because I just stumbled across a "Daily Standup" shortcut in Apple's Shortcuts gallery–its looks to be a stripped down version of the shortcut I posted to RoutineHub–the structure and variable names are similar. It even uses the same icon.

Above: My shortcut on the right, Apple's on the left. My version is a little smarter about preceding - characters for each line item. Apple removed that logic, and puts a - in front of each line without exception.

To be clear, I think this is dope. I shared the shortcut in the spirit of helping people save time, and I am happy to see Apple pick it up and elevate it to a level I couldn't on my own. A little credit wouldn't hurt tho...

There... I fixed it 😂.