What did you do today?

After getting an email the other day from IFTTT about the Heartbleed OpenSSL Bug I realized I had nearly forgotten about the service. I decided to check it out again.

What is IFTTT?

For those who don’t know, IFTTT is “a service that lets you create powerful connections with one simple statement: if this then that”. The idea is to link channels/services like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail to create relationships between them. Each connection has both triggers and actions to make up a “recipe”. If you’re interested in more of the details you can check out their about page. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Never again will I forget to take the trash out thanks to a tweak of this recipe that sends me a text message reminder every Monday night.

So how did it help?

A quick brainstorm of how to use IFTTT to improve productivity brought me to a conclusion of creating a personal work log. I’m usually forgetting the next day what exactly I accomplished the previous day, let alone a week or two later. Note-taking apps have failed me as a log because you have to remember to actually open up the app. That’s where the power of IFTTT comes in.

By creating two recipes I now have an email coming to my inbox every day at 4:45pm asking what I did today. Then I can send an email to a trigger email address to create a post on a WordPress.com blog I created as a personal work log. The benefits of using a blog vs. a simple Google Doc is the work log is now searchable.

The only thing that would make the workflow better is if I could simply reply to the incoming email, but the trigger email address is different than the from address. But, it’s served me well so far.

Besides increasing productivity, there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with IFTTT. Just check out some of the shared recipes to get an idea of what can be done. If you use the service I’d love to hear what kind of recipes you have.