On Wasting Time With Apple Shortcuts

February 2, 2026

Today, I spent far too much time fucking with Apple Shortcuts just to do something embarrassingly simple: append the current date and time to a specific Bear note on iPadOS.

After all the time I spent trying, I still didn’t have a working shortcut. Even with help from Claude.

For comparison, I had created the exact same behavior on my Mac using a shell script and Keyboard Maestro. It took about 15 minutes. Here’s the timestamp Apple Shortcuts and I argued over:

#### 02 February 2026 07:03 PM

This is why I will never be iPad-first.