frozen octopus

Buying a pencil satisfies many needs for me. My hunter/gatherer genes get a chance to do something when shopping without spending tons of money. My brain/heart feels less guilty for stomping around a store and leaving empty-handed. My hands love it because holding a pencil is the closest thing to holding a drumstick in the stationery store.

I use them at home, work, and band practice. The only small drawback is that once they're sharpened down to shorter than your hand, the balance gets weird. At that size, they're cool for writing a tiny note or putting in an everyday carry bag. Mini-golf pencil-sized pencils are a pain for writing for five minutes straight, though.

My solution lately is that when a pencil gets shorter than hand width, it graduates to "cross-off" level. The longer pencils have to do the hard work of writing word after word on checklists and brain dumps. The short pencils get the honor of crossing off completed tasks and ideas. They stay in the flow until they sharpen away into oblivion.

I am currently working on a website that has a couple hundred music releases. Each release has a list of songs. Unfortunately the song lists aren't formated correctly. They all have a number at the beginning and a time at the end and they aren't in a proper html ol list element.

ex: 1. song name 2:34

I need the "1." gone and the "2:34" wrapped in parenthesis for each song in each release. Shortcuts has an Ask ChatGPT action that is perfect for this scenario.

Shortcut

1. Get Clipboard
2. Ask ChatGPT to "Convert these song names into html <ol> and put parenthesis around the times at the end of the song name. If it has no time, ignore that step. Remove the numbers at the beginning. Give me only the <ol>: [Clipboard]"
3. Copy AskGPT results to Clipboard

There is a few extra find/replace actions I didn't include because they are project specific. I just need to copy the list and run the shortcut and I get a nice, tidy ol list of all song names formated like this...

song name (2:34)

If you have to do a thing more than 3-4 times, there is an automation. The beauty of Shortcuts is you can make one quick, use it, and then delete it. I don't save them because creating them is great practice. Over time you start to level up your building skills.

Sidenote: I did hit a limit with ChatGPT after a while..."You've reached our limit of messages per hour. Please try again later."