Episode 17 of Automators comes to you live from PodCon!
I personally use TripIt to create my itineraries - it actually automates
everything for me. I could let it read my email inbox and auto create
itineraries, but I prefer to choose which emails to forward to it. As I
mentioned on the show I also have a filter in Gmail that marks and read and
deletes all of the "Your TripIt Itinerary was imported" emails - I only need
to do something if it didn't work after all.
David rolls his own travel schedule system - with Bear. The advantage of Bear is you can easily add attachments and text to a document, meaning everything is in the same place. You can even use a nice Shortcut to allow you to append a document or text to a specific Bear note: Append to Bear
This is an automation I mentioned that is a little hacky, but it works well
for me. TripIt creates a calendar, or you can use any of your own calendars
for this if you don't want to use TripIt - you just need to get that calendar
into Google Calendar. What we do is we watch this calendar for new events,
then we filter - continuing if the length of the event is more than 23 hours.
Then I use the text action to write up the TaskPaper I want to be added to
OmniFocus, and URL encode it. The final step is to add a task to OmniFocus -
this is accomplished via the MailDrop, and it has a URL scheme which looks
something like
omnifocus:///paste?target=/folder/Travel&content=
-%202019/09%20-%20Amsterdam%0A%09-%20Organise%20Travel
in the body - so when this task arrives in my inbox and I process it, I just
tap on the URL to add the project. You can even run a Shortcut via a URL
scheme (which I usually do!). The Zapier steps are:
Duration (hours) Greater than 23
This series of steps is a pretty solid way to add projects and tasks to OmniFocus based on other events happening, I use it for lots of automations.
https://youtu.be/4gJfgDKWH8k
I use a modular approach to create my packing list - along with an extra list of devices to charge! While I save this to OmniFocus you could easily modify this to work in any task management system, or just to create a PDF to print if that's what you prefer to do.
Scanner Pro is an app David and I both use to scan documents on the go - as
well as when we're on the road. It has built-in OCR, and Workflows which allow
you to chain multiple actions together. Most of the time I use a Workflow
called "Simple Scan" which formats the name to
Scan Year-Month-Day,
Time
and saves the document as a PDF to Dropbox. I usually save to a specific
folder in Dropbox which Hazel then watches and automatically files certain
things or me.
Airmail is a mail app for power users, especially with its custom actions. I have a custom action which forwards the email to TripIt and then moves it to my Gmail account's Travel tag, this allows me to find all my travel email quickly if I need it, and gets it into TripIt without me needing to remember to forward it as well.
This Shortcut isn't really generic, but hopefully, it will inspire some of you. To get to the airport I take a tram and then a train (at least most of the time). The tram normally takes 11 minutes to get to the train station, and then the train should take 16 minutes to get to the airport. While I could use the public transit API to get all of the information to figure out my route to the airport I prefer to look at the available times in the app and choose which one I would prefer to take - before adding this to my calendar. This Shortcut asks me for the departure and arrival time for each mode of transport (and automatically suggests the arrival time based on the departure time) allowing me to just input 2 dates and times most of the time. You can grab it here: Airport Travel.
If you haven't already listened, make sure to check out episode 17: Live at PodCon!
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