Productivity

Futureland Task Tracking! No more manually tracking your tasks to log to Futureland. Start on Mac, End on iOS!

Benjamin Metcalfe

• 3 min read
Futureland Task Tracking! No more manually tracking your tasks to log to Futureland. Start on Mac, End on iOS!
Futurelands UI preview and Habits Implementation

I created this based on my time tracking shortcut that was created for logging my time spent on tasks in Apple Notes. I begun to think about how to implement it into Futureland and if I even could, then @lucas asked if I would make one for Futureland — so I happily obliged as I love Futureland, and wanted the feature myself.

Actually, pretty stoked on it’s results, and the functionality its brought to Futureland for me. It’s easily customizable, just edit the temporary Text Field Stores with the Data you’d like to track. Anything that doesn’t require additional data from the start time other than that — the start time, would be as easy as adding the variable to the Text Field. For example:

  • If you do not want to track the Area, Intention, or anything but the Start Time, End Time, and Time Tracked — Delete every line from the Temporary Text Store in the shortcut.

If you want to log JUST the time spent in the task, delete ALL lines except Time Logged:

  • You can edit the formatting of the logging just as easily! If you don’t even want to have a Time Logged:and just want the actual time spent on the task to be logged by itself, eg: 16 mins — delete everything EXCEPT the 📅Time Between Dates variable.
🗒️
This shortcut stores some temporary data locally in the form of 2 .txt files that you pick the location of in setup. These files automatically delete and re save themselves and take up less than 20kb of data total unless you add thousands of words of notes. No data externally collected from the shortcut aside from the data collected by Futureland itself.
Loom Video showing an Overview of Workings

Demo of Shortcut in Action

Demo of Shortcut GIF Video

Setup and Tips & Tricks / Uses (WIP)

Hopefully the import questions will make the setup easy and hard to fail or misunderstand, but this is my first time exporting a shortcut and using import questions — so this is backup.

Upon downloading the shortcuts and importing them into your Shortcuts App, or creating the shortcut from scratch based on above templates:

In the Start Time Tracking Shortcut

  1. You’ll most importantly need to decide where you want to store the configuration .txt files.
  2. Do it in an out of sight, out of mind location — you really won’t need to refer to them for anything once you set it up correctly the first time. They’re just REQUIRED in order to hold the Start Time variable and be able to Calculate the Difference to tell you the time spent on a task.3. Choose the Categories/Areas you’d like to track and fill them in the List.
  3. If you want to — Customize the Formatting of the Text by changing the Text action’s Text.
  4. Must make sure you don’t delete the variables, or must know how to create your own if you do modify the variables in any way except order or text name that comes before the variable.
  5. So, you can change the Emojis or the “End Time”, change the bold text, etc. Just use Markdown Formatting like usual.
    If you remove the middleman config .txt file creation portion of the shortcut, you’d need API access or a way to append to an entry in Futureland. Neither of these unfortunately are available yet, so this fills the void completely til’ then.

Default Location: iCloud Drive/Shortcuts/

In the Stop Time Tracking Shortcut

  1. Must enter the location you chose in the Start Time Shortcut.
  2. This allows it to grab the data from the .txt files in the location you chose in the Start Shortcut.
  3. If you want to — Customize the Formatting of the Text by changing the Text action’s Text like mentioned above.

Sign up for more like this.

Enter your email
Subscribe