Yesterday over on Six Colors, Jason Snell wrote about his difficulty helping a friend use the Calendar actions in Shortcuts to pull data from two separate calendars:
Lex wanted to use this shortcut to quickly generate a list of times where he’s available for meetings. This is a great use of automation—I wish I’d thought of it. Unfortunately, the shortcut only checks a single calendar, and Lex wanted his availability judged based on entries in two different calendars.
This thread caught my eye: both because I haven’t personally run into that issue, but also because I had actually thought of the automation.
Here’s my Copy my availability shortcut that I built all the way back when Shortcuts was Workflow, which has managed to live on in the Shortcuts Gallery today as the “Share Availability” shortcut.1
In the piece, Jason came up with a solution after Shortcuts couldn’t get all the data in one action:
Here was what worked: I duplicated the Find Calendar Events action, making two separate actions, one for each calendar. I placed the results of both actions in a variable, and used the variable for the rest of the script.
I’ve just updated my shortcut with this Add to Variable method too — which is infinitely better than the simple filter I’ve been using for “Calendar Is Not iCloud.”
Read the post on Six Colors and get the Copy my availability shortcut in the Meetings folder of the Shortcuts Library.
- The concept was inspired by coworkers at my marketing agency who had so many meetings that I never understood how they found free time to actually do their work (hint: they were extremely overworked and did it all after-hours). ↩
