I’ve been very busy with work lately and many of my regular tasks have been falling by the wayside. To try and make things faster/easier I’ve turned to IFTTT and now I wonder why I waited so long.
What I’ve Automated
AMA Podcast
One of the big things I’ve been missing has been the AMA style video posts I started. My old process was to record with Screenflow, render it to YouTube. Render a second copy and upload it to Blip.tv. Then I needed to create the blog post in WordPress and copy/paste media files, write a description…
It was a bunch of work.
Now with IFTTT I record and render the screencast directly to YouTube. That creates a post in WordPress which uses the title and description I set in YouTube. I still have to render it again so I can have a media file for the podcast feed, but here we have Hazel jump in. It watches a folder and automatically uploads it to Libsyn for me.
Evernote
I haven’t actually missed Evernote but using IFTTT I now can easily send my starred Google Apps emails to Evernote. So client emails that need to be tracked for later just head to Evernote with a single star.
Facebook Content
So WP Theme Tutorial has a Facebook page and I need some regular content for it. Using IFTT and Google Reader I can tag an article with #fb and that will show up in Hootsuite as a draft post. Then it’s simply a matter of sitting down on the weekend and scheduling the posts for the coming week.
More Evernote
A second channel in to Evernote is from Google Reader. There is about 1 article per week in my RSS feeds that I really want to track. Starring it in Google Reader will send it to Evernote.
What Can You Automate
The whole point of automating is to take myself out of a bunch of the manual processes. Starring something is as easy as pressing the ‘s’ key. Before I had to visit the site, and then press the Chrome Evernote button. In the case of an email, I had to copy the text then copy a link to the email and paste it all in to Evernote. Sure we’re talking about saving a few seconds on each task, but that adds up over a week.
What are the items you can take yourself out of the loop on?