iPhone Shortcuts: your phone switches into work mode by itself

The best habits are the ones your phone handles for you. Beyond one-off sequences of steps, the Shortcuts app can also run automations — rules that trigger themselves based on time, location, or what you're currently doing on your phone, with zero taps from you.

A typical scenario

Every morning at the office you do the same thing: silence your phone, turn on a focus mode, and open your task list to see what's planned for the day. Doing it manually takes half a minute, but more importantly, it's easy to forget, especially when you're rushing or dealing with something else. With an automation tied to arriving at the office (or to a specific time), all three steps happen on their own while you're still taking off your jacket.

How to do it

1. Open the Shortcuts app and switch to the Automation tab.
2. Tap + and select Create Personal Automation.
3. Choose a trigger: a specific time, arriving at or leaving a location, opening a particular app, connecting to a Wi-Fi network, and plenty more.
4. Add one or more actions to run — turning on a focus mode, sending a message, starting music, opening an app.
5. Turn off Ask Before Running if you want the automation to run completely without confirmation — otherwise it will ask you every time it fires.
6. Save the automation; from then on it runs in the background by itself until you turn it off or edit it.

The best tools

• Shortcuts app (iOS) — built in, free, handles most everyday automations without writing a single line of code.
• Google Assistant Routines / Tasker (Android) — similar functionality for Android, with Tasker going even further for power users.
• IFTTT — for automations that reach beyond the phone, like connecting to smart home devices or web services.

What you get out of it

• Time: you're not doing a repeating sequence of steps by hand every day — for a three-step morning routine, that's only a few dozen seconds daily, but consistency is the bigger win.
• Reliability: the automation never forgets, whether you're in a rush or your head is full of other things.
• Less mental load: you don't have to think about the steps of the routine, your phone does them for you at the right moment.
• Flexibility: the same principle works for anything that repeats — leaving work, arriving home, opening a specific app.

Pro tip

A tried-and-tested automation: at 8:30 on weekdays, turn on a Work focus mode and open your task list right away. Start with one simple automation, confirm it works reliably, and only then add more — the more you set up at once, the harder it gets to figure out which one does what.