Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Using iOS Shortcuts to keep up your grocery list

Using iOS Shortcuts is a helpful way to automate regular actions. This week’s tip comes from mirbogat, who uses the home screen icons to have one-touch access to adding grocery items to their list.

I’m really enjoying the new Shortcuts integration, it’s been truly amazing for my daily routines!

One use case I would like to share is the ability to use Shortcuts to quickly add groceries to my Grocery Shopping List.

This is how I have it set up:

1. Create a new Shortcut and tap ‘Add Action’.
2. Under apps choose RTM and the 'Add Task’ action.
3. Enter the name of a common household item that you usually buy.
4. Add the RTM action 'Set task field’, choose 'List’ and pick the list you want the task to be added to (e.g. 'Grocery Shopping List’).
5. Use the 'Set task field’ action again to add other properties to the task. I have it set to add the location 'Grocery store’.
6. Tap 'Next’ and give the Shortcut a fitting name, e.g. 'Buy Milk’. You can also pick an icon and color for the Shortcut.
7. On the 'My Shortcuts’ screen, tap the three dots to open your newly created Shortcut.
8. Tap the 'Share’ icon in the bottom toolbar and choose 'Add to home screen’.

You now have a Shortcut icon on your home screen that you can easily just tap whenever you need to remember to buy the specific grocery item.

I have added all my grocery shortcuts to a separate folder on my home screen so I can quickly find them when needed.

I have also set an Automation in Shortcuts to automatically show me my Grocery Shopping List when I arrive at the store.

Bonus tip: On the 'Add to home screen’ dialogue (step 8 above), you can tap the icon under 'Name and Symbol on Home Screen’ and choose either a photo or a file as the icon. I made a Google search for 'milk icon’ and saved an icon to my iCloud Drive. I have now picked it as the icon for my 'Buy Milk’ shortcut. This makes it even faster to distinguish one grocery item from another!

Thanks for sharing this tip, mirbogat! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.

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