How I track my life with Integromat, Airtable, Shortcuts and Timing (et al)

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2. THE SECOND MORNING ROUTINE

What happens after this depends on how much time I have before I have to wake up my kids. But lets imagine that I woke up 6:30 when the lights turned on in my room.

A) BATHROOM, SCALE, WATER

At this point I get out of bed and go to bathroom (well, toilet, really). I have there another NFC tag that I read with my iPhone X. This runs a “Toilet” shortcut that offers me a list of options: Pee, Poo, “Bidé shower” (?), Teeth brushing.

Yes, I track my pee/poo because I want to see how my bathroom activity is linked to my weight. I’m in the process of getting back to my normal weight after gaining 6 kg (about 11 pounds) in two years, due to too little physical activity and aging.

Whatever I do is tracked again to Airtable base “Time Management” (which I accidentally call in some posts below “Time Tracking” base – the literal translation of “Ajanhallinta” is time management though).

I take a glass of water with me and go back to upstairs to my bedroom. I step on my Withings WIFI-scale, then read NFC tag on my dresser and get a list of options related to bedroom, including “Weight”.

I press that and open a Shortcut that first opens the Withings Health Mate app, so that it gets my weight info from the scale (while Shortcuts app waits me to return back to it).

When I return to Shortcuts, it gets my newly measured weight from Apple Health app, asks for a comment (like why I think the weight is in that morning what it is) and then uploads the information to “Time Management” Airtable base.

Then I drink the water and get back to bed.

B) MORNING PAGES IN REMARKABLE

I sit in my bed, having a bright light lamp (and the Philips Hue lights on blue-tinted bright setting) in front of me and write my toughts – basically a stream of consciousness – to my ReMarkable “paper tablet” device. I name the notebook as “PKyyyymmdd” – so for instance today my note was called PK20200118. PK comes from the word “PäiväKirja” – literally “Day Book” aka Diary.

I usually write about 3–5 pages, depending of the amount of thoughts I have and how much time I have. This technique comes from Julia Cameron’s book The Artists Way.

I save the diary but don’t yet export it, because I will write more to it in the evening.

C) FEELINGS

At some point after I wake up and before I go to wake up my kids, I run my “feelings” Shortcut, that asks me four things:

  1. Feeling (from 1-5 where 1 means I feel somehow horrible and 5 means I feel in some way amazing)

  2. Focus (from 1-5 where 1 means I can’t focus on anything and 5 means I feel I can have a laser-like focus)

  3. Energy (from 1-5 where 5 is the most energy I can have)

  4. To choose emotions from a long list of words I have grouped/sorted by the quality of emotion that makes sense to me).

  5. Comment/thoughts related on my feelings at that moment.

This information is first send to my “Time Management” base at Airtable and then as a new note to Day One app.

D) MORNING PLAN

Next I run a shortcut called “Morning Plan”. Usually I do this after I’ve taken my kids to preschool/school, but if I still have time before having to wake up my kids, I do it right before I go to wake them up.

This Shortcut first asks for following things (in Finnish, the following translations are just rough translations):

  1. “Today I want to feel…”
  2. “The best thing that could happen today is…”

Then it gets a json-file where I record once a week/month my monthly and weekly goals/themes, shows me what those were and asks:

  1. “I’m going to advance [these goals] by…”
  2. “ToDos I remember right now…”
  3. “Today’s most important goal is…”
  4. “What can prevent me from reaching the goal is…”
  5. “I’ll ovecome that obstacle by…”
  6. “I’ll overcome that obstacle beause…”

Then the Shortcut shows me a text where it has all my answers written as full sentences (like: “Today I want to feel peace and harmony”) and asks if the text is OK.

I often dictate the answers, so if there are some spelling mistakes or such, I have a chance to fix them. Plus I feel that it is useful to read through the whole plan.

Then the Shortcut saves my answers as a json dictionary-file named with the date (today was 2020-01-18.json) to a “Plan”-folder at iCloud, sends the todos to Things app, the whole thing to “Time Management” Airtable base and creates a new note to Day One app with the full text.

E) WAKING UP MY KIDS

I wake up my kids by going into their room that has had its light turned on by Philip Hue about 20 minutes before they have to wake up. I turn on a bluetooth speaker and scan a NFC tag on the desk (again by telling Siri to “open” so that it opens the NFC reader app).

The NFC tag starts a Shortcut that recognizes that it is morning, makes the light in the room as bright as possible and starts a “Kids’ morning” playlist, that has their favorite songs. The music helps especially my preschooler to wake up and get up in a better mood.

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