We are nearly done with July, so it’s at least a month late to say “we are halfway through 2026.” Now is still a good time to run biannual checks on week-based automation before July is actually over. And if you are trying to get how many weeks are left from date X in year Y, Shortcuts does have an answer.

1. Download the shortcut through this link.
2. The shortcut takes a dictionary with two values, start and end, where start is date X, and end is interpreted as the target year Y*.
   {"start": "07/30/26", "end": "07/30/26"}
   Running the dictionary as above will return 22, meaning there are 22 weeks left in year 2026.
   * The end variable will take only the year of any date variable, so no need to sanitize it.
3. (opt) If you would like to get how many weeks are left in the current year, you can create a shortcut that feeds the values automatically with the current date. Here’s an example shortcut I created.
   

A bit of tangent. I made this shortcut while I was investigating what kind of shortcuts Siri AI would be able to create instead of running a local LLM or querying Apple Intelligence servers (it was sort of a benchmark test I came up with). What I quickly learned, however, was that my automation stacks need this very shortcut before Siri AI is even released. Knowing how many weeks are left or what week of the year we are on makes it easy to plan ahead for automation.