Apple recently released a shortcut called Remember This. Aimed at people who have short-term memory
loss, the shortcut is designed to allow people to quickly build a visual log of what they’ve
been getting up to throughout the day, all done with a couple of taps on your phone,
or even just with your voice. I’ve been trying it out this past week, and while it’s simple,
it’s very good, and I think it’s use can stretch beyond memory loss, I think it’s
a great mindfulness tool as well. So in this short video, I’m going to show you how to get the
shortcut setup and running, and then we’ll explore some options for how you might choose to use it.
OK, let’s get into it.
## What the shortcut does
Very simply, when you run this shortcut, you’re going to capture a snippet of text and a photo,
which is then compiled into a daily journal note in your Notes app, in chronological order. So
essentially, you can look back at the day, and see what you did, both in text and photo form.
You can capture quite long snippets of text if you wish, or you can just capture a single sentence,
and then come back and edit them later on. And the shortcut talks you through the entire process,
starting by asking you what you’d like to remember, then asking you to capture a photo.
The creation of the note is totally automatic, and the entire thing takes a matter of seconds,
once you’ve got this up and running, so it’s a very convenient way of doing this.
## Getting the shortcut
First things first, if you don’t already have it installed on your iPhone,
you’re going to need to go and get the Shortcuts app from the App Store, it’s a free download,
it looks like this, it’s developed by Apple so it’s perfectly safe to download and install.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll then want to open the Shortcuts app,
and tap at the bottom to go to the Gallery. In the search box, type in Remember, and then the
Shortcut you want looks like this. Tap the plus icon to add the shortcut to your shortcuts app.
That’s essentially it, in terms of getting this shortcut setup, it’s very simple as all of the
work creating the shortcut has been done for you. Your next choice is how you want to run
the shortcut, and there’s three ways that you can do this. You can do it by voice,
by tapping a button on your home screen, or you can automate the entire process to
run automatically at certain times of the day. Let me show you each method.
## Running the shortcut as a button
Let me show you how to run this as a Shortcut from the Home screen first. To do this,
we need to go back to the Shortcuts app, and find the Shortcut in the Shortcuts
tab. Tap the ellipsis button on the shortcut, and then on this screen,
choose Share. Scroll down a little, and choose Add to Home Screen, and choose Add on the next screen.
The shortcut will now be added as an app icon on your home screen. When you want to run the
shortcut, you would simply tap the button. But before we do that, let me show you one other
trick here, to get this showing as a larger icon. Tap and hold on the Home Screen for a moment to go
into jiggle mode, and tap the plus button in the upper left. Scroll down until you see Shortcuts,
and tap on that. You then want to choose this single widget tile, which handily has defaulted
to our most recently added Shortcut, which in this case is exactly what we want. You can see
that it gets added as a much larger tile, which some people are going to find really helpful.
So to run the shortcut in this mode, we would simply tap on one of the buttons
on the Home Screen. The shortcut will ask us what it is that we want to remember,
so we input some text. Tap Done.
The shortcut will then ask us if we’d like to include a photo. I’m going to say yes,
and then the shortcut will activate the camera,
and we can quickly snap a picture. Choose Use Photo, or retake to take another picture,
and if you get asked to allow access, ensure that you choose Always Allow.
That’s it, that’s how this shortcut works. And if we now jump to Notes,
we can see the note that we just created, complete with the text that we just added.
## PDF Shoutout
By the way, there is an accompanying PDF for this video,
with full step by step guide including screenshots, and you can access it,
along with all PDFs moving forward, and the growing library of old ones,
for just $5 a month. Click the link in the description of this video that says ‘get the PDF’.
## Running this shortcut by voice
The other method available is to run the shortcut using Siri. Access Siri however you want to,
either by speaking out the phrase, or holding the side button or whatever you do. Let me show you.
“Remember this”
“read my Kindle”
“Yes”
You’ll take the photo the same way that you usually would,
and remember that if the shortcut asks for permission, you’ll want to grant it.
With that done, let’s jump back to the note,
and you can see how it’s updated the existing note with what I just added.
## Automating the shortcut
The last thing I want to show you is how you can set this shortcut to run automatically,
via an automation. The benefit of this of course is that you don’t have to remember to run it,
you can have the shortcut appear at set times each day, reminding you to stop what
you’re doing and capture a snapshot of what you’re doing at that moment in time. If you
suffer with short term memory loss, this is obviously going to be really helpful,
but I also think that from a mindfulness perspective, being reminded to do this a
few times each day could be a really good way of journalling. It’s really easy to set this up.
Open Shortcuts, and tap on Automation down at the bottom. Choose Create Personal Automation.
On this next screen, choose Time of Day.
Choose the time of day that you’d like this automation to run, in other words,
which time of the day would you like the Remember This shortcut to automatically run?
I’m going to choose 8am. You can set multiple automations by the way, so don’t worry if you’d
like this to run in the morning, afternoon and evening for example, you can do that.
Choose Next when you’re happy, and then choose Add Action.
On this next screen, choose Apps,
and then scroll down and choose Shortcuts. On this next screen, choose Run Shortcut.
So the automation is, at 8am every day, your phone is going to run a shortcut, but we’ve not yet
specified which one. Tap into ‘shortcut’ here, and choose Remember This from the list. Choose Next.
I would personally leave Ask Before Running enabled. With this enabled,
the shortcut will prompt you to allow it to run each day, rather than simply running,
it’s up to you if you’d like to enable this or not. Choose Done when you’re finished.
And that’s it. You can then setup multiple automations
for different times of the day if you wish.
## End
So there you go, a very quick video exploring how the Remember This shortcut works. Like I
said at the start of the video, it’s a simple shortcut, but if you’re someone impacted by
short term memory loss, or if you’re someone who’s into mindfulness, and you’d like to be
able to log what you get up to each day, this shortcut could be invaluable. What do you think,
is this something you think you might use? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.