If This, Then That: IFTTT
Connie Brenton, Chairman of the Board for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), recently gave a presentation on the importance of workflows in law. While individuals have far fewer things in life we need to automate, there are tools that exist to help save precious seconds and minutes for various repetitive tasks in our day to day activities.
I want to explore some of the tools I use to make work and study more efficient and easier. The first tool is one of my favorites: IFTTT. However, I know very few people who implement it in their workflows. And, from time to time, I almost forget it exists because it automatically performs numerous tasks for me with minimal interaction on my part — which I already take for granted.
IFTTT stands for If This, Then That. It is a common idea for software programming and workflow management. Given X input, Y should result.
You start with an idea of two services that you would like to link through what IFTTT calls a recipe. A recipe consists of a triggering action and a resulting response. By linking your accounts to IFTTT, you are able to automate an input and result.
For one example, I use IFTTT to link Medium posts like this one to my LinkedIn account. Medium allows users to natively post links to published articles on Facebook and Twitter, but it does not do the same for LinkedIn. Because I want these posts to be part of my professional portfolio — signaling things that interest me and showing I want to share those things with my peers — I also want to share these posts to LinkedIn.
Without IFTTT, the process would involve publishing a story on Medium, getting the link, and generating a post on LinkedIn manually each time. Instead, I can use IFTTT to complete the process for me each time automatically when it detects I made a post on Medium.
First, I start a new workflow.
Then I choose the service I would like to serve as the triggering action.
Then I use an available action to designate what I would like to create the trigger. Here, I used “Post published by you.” These actions are different for each service — some have dozens of triggers and others have relatively few.
Then, I am prompted to designate a result.
I search for and choose LinkedIn.
I elect a result. In this case, I chose “Share a link.” These results are also different depending on the service used.
I am able to then add ingredients to my recipe so the automation can take care of information that will change each time I post — the title of the post, the URL, etc. Across most of the services, the ingredients remain similar — URLs, names of files, etc.
Finally, you are prompted to review the recipe you created.
The end result is something like the image above. I used IFTTT to publish my previous Medium post “Robot, Esquire” to LinkedIn. I scheduled the post to go live at 8am on 7/19/17, and the link was shared moments after 8am to LinkedIn without any additional effort. The same will happen with this post when it goes live.
That is just one example in an innumerable number of examples that IFTTT can simplify a workflow. I also use it to add articles to lists to read later so I don’t miss something important. It appends information to Evernote files. It can add notes to your calendar about incoming phone calls if you want to track when you last spoke to your boss or coworker. It can add expected delivery dates of Amazon orders to your calendar. It can turn to-dos into robo-phone calls reminding you to do something. Its uses are plentiful, and IFTTT frequently adds new services, triggers, and ingredients.
IFTTT is a staple in my workflow, and I hope that it can make your life easier and more efficient, too. Feel free to ask me any questions or to leave comments in the section below.