For quite a while, I’ve been intrigued with the idea of automation–the ability to have technology do tasks automatically. Automation is not new. In fact, to some degree that is why technology was created. Look at calculators and how much time they save us with our equations. Or your thermostat that turns off your furnace at just the right time. Fast-forward to today–we’re about to see a wave of automation like nothing we’ve seen before–and it’s going to be amazing.
You’re probably already using automation in your life to some degree but you don’t realize it. When you have all emails from Amazon go to your “receipts” folder in your email, that’s a form of automation.
I wanted to provide a couple of ways that I already use automation in my day-to-day life. My goal is to give my readers some ideas of how to use automation in their own lives. I’ll talk about the different platforms I’m using and also talk about some things that seem like no-brainers.
Platforms for Automation
ifttt.com –This is a very basic platform. It stand for “If This Than That.” It’s free to use. My frustration is that because of it’s simplicity, it’s severely limited in what it can do (more advanced recipes are not possible).
Zapier.com–This one is probably my favorite. If you know what you’re doing, you can essentially create a program. Zapier talks to so many different programs and can be utilized with Smart Homes.
Flow.microsoft.com –This is Microsoft’s answer to the automation industry. The only way that I would be interested in this solution is if my workplace used Office 365 as there are some really cool things you can do, especially with email.
iOS Shortcuts–If you have an iPhone, you already have this app on your phone. The app allows the user to create recipes (shortcuts) to save time. Unfortunately, it’s not fully automated as the iPhone user has to interact with notifications to allow them to run (even if you say, “iPhone, do this when I get to this location). The notification limitation is quite annoying. Hopefully this will be resolved in iOS 14.
Social Media
You can now use Hashtags to repost a post to other Facebook pages. Or perhaps you want your Facebook post to go to LinkedIn. You can use a particular hashtag for that too. The easiest way to make these work is through Zapier.
YouTube–again you can use Hashtags, but this actually something that YouTube natively supports. If you want, you can use hashtags to add a video to a playlist. There’s also a hashtag, “yt:cc=on” that will throw subtitles on your videos by default (the viewer can still turn them off).
Some of the more sophisticated automations that I’ve created are iOS shortcuts:
There’s several other recipes just like these here: http://shortcutsgallery.com
Both of the programs that I referenced above use web hooks. This is one of the key ingredients for making the automations work. A web hook is a URL address that passes values to a server. It looks like this:
https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/log_miles/with/key/DS:KJSDF?value1=582&value2=523
The above link passes 582 as the first value for a program and 523 as the second value. This one is used to populate values in a Google Sheet report. Web hooks allow your iPhone to talk with your smart home. There’s a ton of other things that you can do with URL addresses, but we’ll save that discussion for another time.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of the oldest and most powerful forms of automation on computers–you’re spreadsheet program. Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel, and Apple Numbers all have various formulas that you can use to save time for equations. Even better, they have something called “Macros.” A Macro is essentially a script that you can run to change your spreadsheet. Say that you have 20 spreadsheet tables–each one for a different customer and you need to change the format. You can do so by “recording” what you did on the first spreadsheet. Then at the end, you would assign a keystroke to the script and run the script on the other 19. The script would do the exact some thing on the other 19 spreadsheets.
No matter your profession, you can find a way to save time through automation. The tools are out there.
Productivity Tech Tips 