Adding tasks to Obsidian from your Apple Watch
The two most important tools in my ADHD toolkit are my Apple Watch and Obsidian.
Obsidian is where I capture every single thought, idea, and task that enters my head. It’s also where I track the stuff I need to do for the day.
Heads up! I’m working on an Obsidian for ADHD boilerplate and quick guide to help you get started. Folks subscribed to my newsletter will get notified when it goes live, and pre-launch discounts.
I use the Homepage plugin to open my Inbox.md file when Obsidian launches, to make it quick-and-easy to jot things down when something comes to me on-the-go or a client or my wife asks me to do something.
But sometimes, I don’t want to have to take my phone out. I want to be able to just tell my watch to add a note and move on with my day.
Obsidian doesn’t have a Watch app. (No shade! The dev team is small, independently funded, and flooded with feature requests.)
Turns out, though, you don’t need one!
Using Apple’s Shortcuts, you can create a shortcut that will run from your iPhone or Apple Watch and can quickly add a task to Obsidian.
The Apple Shortcut
I’ll be including this in the upcoming boilerplate, but you can click here to install the shortcut now. Open that up on your iPhone to install it.
The Shortcut includes a setup process that will ask you where your Obsidian files are located in iCloud, which file you’d like to use for saving todos, and the format to use for items that you add.
Once installed, you can run it by tapping the shortcut on your device or saying “Obsidian” to Siri. You’ll get prompted for some text. It gets saved to you Inbox.md file in this format…
- [ ] {the text your provided} #🦄I’m automatically adding items to my daily todo list because often on-the-run tasks are things I need to do that day.
And if they’re not, it prompts me to process them into where they actually belong later that day.
Important caveats
The first time you run it, you’ll need to give the shortcut permission to read and write to your Obsidian files.
This can only be done on your phone, not your watch, so do a test run on your phone first by tapping the shortcut directly. Don’t try to do it with Siri yet.
Apple Watch will also throw an error saying it didn’t work, but it did. This is a bug related to markdown files. If you were writing to a .txt file, you wouldn’t see the error.
Since Obsidian requires markdown, I just deal with it. All of my notes save just fine. You’ll get a different, more information error if something actually goes wrong.
Creating it from scratch
If you’d rather build your own shortcut from scratch, here’s how to do it…
- Create a new shortcut.
- Add your first action.
- Select Get text from input.
- Tap Input and select Shortcut Input.
- Tap Images and 18 more, and deselect everything except Text.
- Tape Nowhere. Select Show on Apple Watch and Use as Quick Action, then tap Done.
- Under If there’s not input. tap Continue, and change it to Ask For and Text.
- Tap the Search for apps and actions field, and search for Text. Add it as your next action.
- In the text field, type whatever you want added around your text (a dash or number to create a list item, tags, and so on). Use the Text variable to get the actual input text to include.
- Tap the Search for apps and actions field again, and search for Append to Text File. Add it as your next action.
- Tap Shortcuts, then search through your iCloud directory until you find your Obsidian directory. Tap Open.
- Type the name of the file you want to save your text to (in my case, it’s
Inbox.md). - Keep Make New Line enabled.
- If you tap the dropdown at the top of the screen, you can name your shortcut, change the color, and select a representative icon.
- Tape Done to save it.
It might take a minute to sync, but once it does, you’ll be able to use it on your Apple Watch, too.