I use iOS Shortcuts multiple times everyday to make life easier in little ways. Many of those are to log things about my life. Some are fun, like automatically tracking when I arrive and leave the office, using iOS’ geofencing support. Others are useful, like logging expenses (which I have done for nearly three years now). But some others are important. When I sought treatment for migraines last year I logged my pain on a scale every day, and continue to do so. It helped see the effect the treatment was having.
Recently I added a Shortcut to track my water consumption. I know there exist several apps that help remind, track and visualise water intake, but I wanted to build my own so it was flexible, extendable, shareable and reusable. The shortcut is exceedingly simple, run from Launch Center Pro (manually, but quickly) and taking input from a list:
The only difference is I plug the data into Apple Health in addition to my usual plaintext file format. It makes for quick visualisation, which I would have to build manually with the plaintext CSVs.
But I realized that the phone is already tracking my Steps and Sleep via Bedtime (both only approximately), and I can easily have my meditation log feed into the ‘Mindful Minutes’ heath category. In short, even without an Apple Watch, Apple Health is becoming a repository of my wellness data. Because it is possible to export data from the Health app, my current thinking is to embrace the summary and visualisation it offers and expand it, over time, to more categories.