Friday, February 8, 2013

How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love IFTTT Automation


Screen Shot 2013 02 09 at 1 08 18 AMI'm a bigfan of Evernote to help with everything from blog ideas to date ideas and more, and I particularly like sending e-mails to my personal unique SMTP address.  There are some notes that have a lot in common, so I was looking for some way to automatically filter and file based on title.  I found out that you can just use @folder #tag1 #tag2 at the end of the e-mail subject line to automatically have Evernote put the note into the folder named "folder" and tag it with the specified tags.  

As I continued to look around for ideas how to streamline my workflow, I was reminded of a service I had heard of called "If This Then That" or "IFTTT."  Now that I've spent an hour playing with the recipes I'm in LOVE! What an amazing service!  Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, WeMo, Instagram, Foursquare, and Google Reader are just some of the MANY "channels" you can log into from IFTTT. Then you create "recipes" by specifying cause and effect, or "this" and "that."  

As an example, I set up the "phone" channel with my cell phone, and had it call me to read a typed message. It was a clunky computer voice, but it called me right on schedule and got me the message. I may start using that to help me wake up to workout in the morning.  The catch is that it can only be scheduled at 15 minute intervals (:00, :15, :30, :45).  Still, pretty impressive, right?

Don't take my word for it. Go check it out for yourself! Set up your own free account at https://ifttt.com!

Oh, and for the heck of it, I'm going to have IFTTT tweet a message announcing this new blog post.  Let's see if this works...