With more and more social media sites popping up each day it can be hard to keep on top of everything.
You know you need to be involved to get your business out there or because it’s the only way to know what’s happening in your friends lives.If This Then That, otherwise known as IFTTT, is a free online tool that can help you automate your digital world. IFTTT supports over 70 channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Evernote, WordPress, Dropbox, emails and more.
Here’s how it works: you set automated tasks, which they call recipes, to make something happen when it’s triggered by an action.
For instance, you can say if “I post to my Facebook Business Page” then “Share it onto Google + via Buffer”.
Imagine the time you could save cooking up all these “recipes” to automate all these little time draining tasks.
It’s not just for your online world either. You can get your phone to call you on school days with a wake-up message that includes the day’s weather forecast.
Never dress your kids in shorts on a 7 degree day again!
Does your day get consumed by emails? You really need to keep checking it because you’re waiting on one particular email, but every time you do, you get sidetracked by 20 others.
I know the feeling!
You can set up a recipe that says, “if I receive an email with the word proposal in it” then “send me a text with the email”.
TaaDaa! Problem solved… no more excuses.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from reading “The 4 hour work week” by Timothy Ferris. He said to pick two times of the day to check your email (yes only two!).
Say 10am and 4pm, and only check your email then. The important part is to stick to the rule.
I have never checked my email and not been distracted by something that has arrived. Whether it’s a problem that’s come up or the latest catalogue from my favourite shop, it’s usually something that can wait until the next email time slot.
If you have an email your waiting on, you have IFTTT to alert you, so there’s no reason to peek at your emails until it’s time.
I decided to write about a service I had just discovered which was saving me heaps of time by creating automated commands for every day tasks like sharing news to social media sites or even calling me with a wake up message!
This article was originally written for woman.com.au.
