How to Recover Deleted Photos on Android and iPhone

Stop Doing These Tasks Manually on Your iPhone

Your iPhone can do a lot more than send messages, take photos and scroll through social media.

Hidden inside Apple's Shortcuts app is a surprisingly powerful automation system that can take repetitive tasks off your hands. You can create shortcuts that perform several actions with a single tap, trigger automatically based on things like time, location, Wi-Fi or the app you're using, and even launch shortcuts by tapping the back of your iPhone.

The best part? You don't need to be a programmer.

Here are 10 useful iPhone Shortcuts and automations worth setting up.

1. Your Morning Briefing

Instead of opening several apps every morning, create one shortcut that gives you the information you actually need.

For example, your morning shortcut could:

• Show today's weather
• Display your Calendar events
• Show your Reminders
• Give you directions to your first appointment
• Play your favourite morning playlist or podcast

You can then place the shortcut on your Home Screen or in Control Centre for quick access. Apple also supports running shortcuts through Siri and other convenient entry points.

Why it's useful: You turn several small morning tasks into one tap.

2. Turn on a Focus Mode Automatically

If you regularly work at the same time each day, let your iPhone switch into the appropriate Focus automatically.

For example:

9:00 AM → Work Focus

Your iPhone can use a Time of Day automation to trigger actions automatically. Personal automations can also respond to events such as arriving at a location, connecting to Wi-Fi or opening an app.

You could use this to create a simple "work mode" that helps reduce distractions during the day.

You can also create automations around Focus itself, including actions that happen when a Focus is turned on or off.

3. The "I'm Leaving Home" Shortcut

How often do you leave home and then realise you've forgotten something?

Create a shortcut that helps you get organised before you walk out the door.

It could:

• Show your first Calendar event
• Check the weather
• Open Maps
• Display a reminder to take something with you
• Start a favourite playlist or podcast

You can also use an Arrive or Leave automation so the process can be triggered by your location rather than requiring you to remember to run it yourself.

This is a great example of where automation becomes more useful than simply creating another button on your Home Screen.

4. Battery Saver Automation

Your iPhone doesn't need to wait until you're desperately searching for a charger before you start thinking about battery life.

Create an automation that reacts when your battery reaches a particular percentage.

For example:

Battery falls below 30% → Turn on Low Power Mode

Shortcuts supports Battery Level triggers that can activate when the battery reaches a chosen percentage or falls below it. It also supports Low Power Mode and Charger triggers.

You can customise the threshold to suit how you use your phone.

If you regularly finish the day with a nearly empty battery, this tiny automation could become one of your favourites.

5. A One-Tap "I'm Driving" Shortcut

Create a shortcut specifically for getting into the car.

Your shortcut could:

• Open your preferred navigation app
• Start playing music or a podcast
• Send a message to someone
• Read information you need
• Activate a driving-related Focus

You can also build automations around CarPlay, and Apple supports CarPlay as an automatic personal-automation trigger.

The idea isn't to automate everything.

It's simply to remove the handful of repetitive taps you make every time you start driving.

6. Screenshot Cleanup

If you're anything like me, your Photos library can quickly fill up with screenshots.

Receipts.

Delivery information.

Random conversations.

Things you wanted to remember for five minutes.

You can build shortcuts around Photos that help process images and move them through different actions. Apple's Shortcuts system can pass photos, text, URLs and other types of content from one action to another.

For example, you could create a shortcut that helps you quickly process screenshots instead of leaving hundreds of them sitting in your camera roll.

It's a small improvement, but these little improvements add up.

7. The "Copy and Clean" Shortcut

Ever copy text from a website only to discover that it's full of unnecessary formatting?

A shortcut can help process text before you paste it somewhere else.

Shortcuts can pass content between actions, allowing you to transform information as it moves through the shortcut.

You could create a workflow that:

Receives text → cleans or transforms it → copies the result

This can be particularly useful if you regularly work with notes, emails, articles or social media content on your iPhone.

8. Double-Tap the Back of Your iPhone

This one feels like a hidden feature.

You can configure Back Tap to run a shortcut when you double-tap or triple-tap the back of your iPhone. Apple provides this through Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap.

You could assign it to something you use frequently, such as:

• A quick note
• A timer
• Your morning briefing
• A home-control shortcut
• A screenshot-related workflow
• Your favourite productivity shortcut

The real trick is to choose something you use often enough that the gesture actually saves you time.

9. A Quick "At Home" Automation

Your iPhone can react to your location and other triggers, so you can create useful routines around arriving home.

For example, an automation could help you transition from work mode to home mode.

You might have it:

• Turn off a Work Focus
• Turn on a personal Focus
• Open your shopping list
• Show your evening Calendar
• Trigger compatible smart-home actions

Personal automations can use triggers such as arriving at a location, while Home automations can also react to people arriving or leaving and other events.

Once you've configured it, the phone can take care of the repetitive part.

10. Create a "Choose What I Need" Shortcut

This is one of my favourite ways to use Shortcuts.

Instead of creating five different shortcuts, create one shortcut that gives you a menu.

For example:

Quick Actions

• 🗺️ Directions home

• 📝 New note

• ⏱️ Start a timer

• 🎵 Play music

• 📅 Show today's calendar

• 🛒 Open shopping list

When you run the shortcut, you simply choose what you want.

Shortcuts supports menu-style logic and conditional actions, so you can create workflows that take different paths depending on your choice.

It's basically your own mini command centre.

How to Make Shortcuts Even More Useful

The secret isn't creating dozens of complicated automations.

It's identifying the things you do every single day.

Think about the tasks where you repeatedly:

Open an app → find something → tap something → go back → open another app → repeat.

That's exactly the kind of workflow worth automating.

Start with one annoying task.

Build a shortcut.

Use it for a week.

If it genuinely saves you time, keep it. If it doesn't, delete it and try something else.

You can also put frequently used shortcuts in Control Centre, making them available without opening the Shortcuts app.

Don't Overcomplicate It

There's a temptation to build elaborate shortcuts with dozens of actions just because you can.

Don't.

A shortcut that saves you three taps every day can be more useful than an impressive automation that you only use once a month.

The best shortcuts are the ones that quietly remove friction from your routine.

And once you get comfortable with simple shortcuts, you can start experimenting with variables, conditions and more advanced workflows. Apple's Shortcuts system supports things like variables, If actions, lists and APIs, so there's plenty of room to grow.

Final Thoughts

The iPhone is already packed with features, but Shortcuts is where things start to get really interesting.

You don't have to become an automation expert.

Start small.

Automate your morning routine. Create a battery-saving automation. Set up a Back Tap shortcut. Build a one-tap command centre for the things you do most often.

Then look for the next repetitive task.

That's the real benefit of Shortcuts: you spend a little time setting something up once, so your iPhone can save you time every day afterwards.

And if you're running a recent version of iOS, it's worth exploring Shortcuts again even if you've ignored it in the past. Apple continues to add and improve actions and automation capabilities across its software platforms.