I Got Tired of Copying and Pasting the Same Text Every Quarter

Every quarter, Under Armour gives employees a friends and family discount code. It's genuinely a great perk — a sale window, a promo code, a flyer, and a chance to hook up the people you care about with some good gear.

The problem? Every quarter I was doing the same thing manually. Open my contacts. Find the right people. Type out a message. Attach the flyer. Send. Repeat. It wasn't hard, it was just tedious — and tedious is exactly the kind of thing a shortcut should handle.

So I built one.

The shortcut lives on my phone's home screen. When the discount window opens, I tap it and it asks me three things: the start date of the sale, the end date, and the promo code. I drop in those details, and it grabs the flyer image I've already saved to my phone. From there, it fires off a text to everyone on a specific contact list — a pre-written message with the dates, my personal code, and the flyer attached — asking if they want in.

Here's where it gets a little smarter: if someone replies with UACODE, a second shortcut automatically sends them the code and image. No follow-up needed on my end.

The whole thing takes me about 30 seconds now instead of however long it used to take.

The point isn't that this is complicated — it's that it doesn't have to be. iOS Shortcuts is free, it's already on your phone, and it doesn't require any coding knowledge. If you find yourself doing the same thing more than twice, it's worth asking whether your phone can just... do it for you.

That's the mindset. And once you start applying it, you'll see opportunities everywhere.