The 8 fastest ways to run a shortcut on our iPhone, iPad or Mac

Running a shortcut quickly just when we need it is becoming more and more important. Thanks to the flexibility offered by shortcuts we use more and more to carry out certain tasks like adding events to the calendar quickly or seeing the battery cycles of our iPhone, to name a couple of examples. So let’s see the fastest ways to run a shortcut on our iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Quick and easy execution

There are several ways to run shortcuts, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. From asking Siri to opening the app manually, there are several intermediate scenarios that can be useful in different situations and depending on how we use the shortcut in question. On iPhone and iPad the fastest ways to run a shortcut are as follows:

• Ask Siri: A request as simple as “Hey Siri run [nombre del atajo]” and the system will take care of the rest.
• Add the shortcut to the home screen: We can add any shortcut to the home screen, just as if it were an app. To do this we will enter the shortcut edition, with the three dots button, we will touch the button in the form of settings in the upper right and we choose Add to home screen. After customizing the name and the icon we touch Add to have more than direct access to the execution of the shortcut.
• Use the share menu: In the shortcut settings, just below Add to home screen we can activate Show in share menu, ideal for quickly executing those shortcuts that depend on previously selected content.
• Use the widgets: Thanks to the Shortcuts widget we can execute different shortcuts from the home screen. It is true that they occupy a little more space on the screen than if we added them to the home screen individually, but it could be an interesting option to gather a good number of them in a stack, for example.

On the Mac we also have some resources that we can use The one of executing the shortcut through Siri is totally applicable, but we can also use these systems:

• Use a keyboard shortcut: One of the fastest methods. In the preferences of all the shortcuts we can mark Add keyboard shortcut to register a keystroke that executes the shortcut. A method that we can use from any app, without even interrupting the workflow.
• Use the Shortcuts menu: In the settings of each shortcut we can mark Show in menu bar to create a list of shortcuts that will appear in the menu bar, under the Shortcuts app icon. From there we can execute any shortcut from any part of the system, in fact we can execute more than one at a time.
• Shortcuts in the Dock: From the Shortcuts app we can select any of them, go to the menu Archive and choose Add to Dock. With this we can execute the shortcuts very quickly, perhaps even more than from the menu bar.
• Shortcuts in the Launchpad: The shortcuts we added to the Dock are also displayed on the Launchpad. A good place to go with a gesture to execute our favorite shortcuts at full speed.

There are still some options more when executing shortcuts. On the Mac we can, for example, place them on the desktop. On the iPhone and iPad we can also automate its execution. In any case, the ones we have just seen are the fastest ways to “manually” execute any shortcut.