IFTTT: (If) You’d Like to Automate Evernote, (Then) You Should Try These
In a busy world, more apps and services often mean more clutter. Ideas get scattered across notes, files, social media posts, and emails. Contacts are in one app, photos in another. Moving information is a pain, if we remember to do it at all. That’s where IFTTT comes in.
IFTTT (“If This, Then That,” pronounced “IF-tee”) makes it easy to connect your favorite apps by creating simple recipes known as “applets”: If something happens in one app, IFTTT automatically triggers an action in another app. For example, if you add a new contact to your phone, IFTTT can create a note for that contact in Evernote. You can create a new applet yourself in under a minute (no coding required), or use any of the thousands of applets shared by other IFTTT users. Here are a few of our favorite applets that connect to Evernote.
Gmail:
More than half of Evernote customers have Gmail accounts, and IFTTT makes it ridiculously easy to archive important pieces of information from Gmail. You can tell IFTTT to save all your Amazon order confirmations and iTunes receipts into a notebook, for example, so you can see how much you spent. (Try not to be too scared to look at the results at the end of the year.) Or you could create an applet to save all emails from a particular sender to Evernote.
Facebook:
Whether you know it or not, you’ve been keeping a diary. Every time you post a status on Facebook, you’re capturing a tiny snippet of your life. Maybe you’re announcing that you got a new car or a job, sharing a favorite meme, video, photo, or article, or pouring out your heart to your sympathetic audiences. With the IFTTT applet that saves your Facebook statuses in Evernote, you have a rich, multimedia journal that you can share, embellish, reflect upon, and reminisce.
Reddit:
Reddit is an avalanche of information, opinions, advice, and more, and dedicated Redditors swear by its old-school format. But if you’re collecting a particular type of information, Reddit can be difficult to navigate. Save popular productivity tips from Reddit’s/r/productivity subreddits so that you can review them later. Or, if there’s another topic you’re following, use this IFTTT applet to create a note in Evernote whenever you save a post on Reddit.
Dropbox:
Did you know that you can copy files saved in Dropbox to Evernote? The benefit of duplicating Dropbox files is the powerful search functionality that Evernote offers. It might be difficult to find files in Dropbox, but Evernote will find notes based on any remembered word in the document, including handwriting and words captured in images.
WordPress:
Bloggers appreciate the IFTTT applet that allows them to create content in Evernote and then post it directly to WordPress blogs. Naturally, you’ll want to pop over to WordPress to ensure that the HTML and formatting are correct, but the real magic here is the ability to create, post, and archive content in once place. You’ll find applets that go the opposite way (saving posts from WordPress to Evernote) and applets that do the same things for Medium.
Android and iOS:
There is no shortage of IFTTT applets connecting iOS and Android devices to Evernote, and they have pretty much the same functionality across platforms. There are applets for saving photos and contacts to Evernote, logging calls, turning your reminders into checklists in Evernote, and creating to-do lists.
Some applets you see may seem silly. Why, you ask, do you need to save your Feedly favorites in Evernote when you can simply save them…in Feedly? It’s not as strange as it seems. Evernote not only gives you a higher level of search functionality, but it also provides context. For example, if you’ve saved an article in Feedly to read later, and IFTTT copies it into Evernote, Evernote will offer suggestions for other notes on the same or related subject that you might have forgotten about.
A word of caution: it’s easy to forget you have an IFTTT applet running. Some applets create individual notes every time the applet is triggered. Make sure you really want IFTTT to do what you ask of it — because it will.
Using IFTTT to connect Evernote with the other apps and services you use every day means you can increase your productivity without having to lift a finger. IFTTT makes it possible to save a lot of time, but there may be a little time investment up front. However you use it, IFTTT helps you get more from Evernote by automating tasks that would otherwise be too labor-intensive to do manually.
Do you have favorite IFTTT applets for Evernote? Share them with us!
Written by Pamela Rosen on December 8, 2016. Originally published on the Evernote blog.
