meetings Archives – Matthew Cassinelli

Last week, I came across a useful shortcut for calling into meetings, tweeted out by Matt Galligan, former founder of Circa and now CEO of Interchange¹:

I hate always having to open my calendar app to find the phone number of the next meeting I need to call into. So a while back I built a shortcut to streamline the whole process, and it’s saved a bunch of time.

Here it is in case you find it useful too:https://t.co/SUjxFnEPs8

— Matt Galligan (@mg) April 12, 2019

The shortcut grabs your next calendar event, extracts the phone number, and dials it for you – with a trigger phrase set up, you can just say “Dial In” to Siri and it’ll just work.

Matt also has a neat way for sharing this and his other shortcuts: using Notion.

After a meeting with someone new yesterday, I realized there was a few places where I could have used the Shortcuts app to speed up the processes around our encounter.

Before the meeting, I was headed somewhere new and needed to figure out how to get there on time.

During the meeting, I was fumbling with my phone a bit, handing it to them to type in their contact information, and didn’t have an easy way to share mine either. Plus, I dealt with everything after the meeting too – writing down notes, sharing my info, and following up later.

From all this, I noticed a few repeating patterns, that could be automated using mostly default apps – the data I need already exists or can be entered on the fly.

So, I came up with a few jobs to be done:

Knowing when to leave to get to the meeting on time
Getting directions to the meeting when it’s time to leave
Sharing your “business card” contact information
Logging someone else’s contact information
Taking helpful meeting notes afterwards
Following up with them the same day (or later)
Scheduling that follow up if it’s not today