What are your favorite or most useful workflows on IFTTT/Zapier?

I have a couple:

  1. Tagging a Pocket bookmark with “family” sends the link to a GroupMe chat that has family members on it. Tagging it with particular names (really just two or three people whom I know really well) sends them an email with said link. All these workflows are on IFTTT.

  2. I use Atracker to track my time, and I use a setting on it that automatically sends these entries to a Google Calendar. Then use IFTTT to send these entries to both Airtable and Google Sheets. Great for future data analysis, eventually, I plan to build a personal dashboard from this data and other stuff from point (5) below.

  3. I extract links from all emails that I get from Free Code Camp and Five Bullet Friday (Tim Ferris) - these are two email digests that I care about and that tend to have a specific structure - and I send them to an Airtable base. I extract the links with regular expressions (Zapier has this cool feature where you can run a Python or JavaScript script on data).

  4. Forward credit card bills (match on email search and pull out attachments) to a particular Dropbox folder with Zapier. Hazel then runs a script to remove the password, renames them appropriately and files them off.

  5. I share my progress on apps like Seven (quick workouts), Elevate (games!), Forest (current Pomodoro app of choice), and Activity using Workflow on iOS to a Dropbox folder. Zapier then picks this up and dumps it in a Airtable base, which is great for automated life-logging and is fun to review once in a while :slight_smile:

I’ve not had much luck with IFTTT lately, been using Zapier with better success.

I mostly use it to save certain attachments (your #4) to dropbox and ifttt was missing some I had setup, zapier has been pretty good so far.

Do you mind sharing your remove PW script, I have that issue with Duke Energy?

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I set up Zapier to post all the new MPU and Free Agents episodes to this forum via the Discourse API, does that count? :wink:

I have all of my blog and micro blog posts automatically added to Day One for me, which is a nice way to automate journaling.

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I have an IFTTT flow that activates whenever I put something in Pocket. It puts an item on my ToDo list in Todoist. Similarly, I have a Zap that triggers whenever FileThis puts a new bill in Evernote. It puts something on my ToDo list. (Yes, there is a pattern here – getting things onto my ToDo list is important to me :slight_smile:

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Awesome - that’s very cool, of course :slight_smile:

And yes, I’m also exploring getting more stuff into DayOne on autopilot. For now, I’m getting any notes added from Atracker into Dayone and Evernote… trying to see if I can automate the process of logging my Things logbook into Dayone as well - exploring using things.sh (a CLI for Things) for this…

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I run this shell script:

qpdf --decrypt --password=YOURPASSWORD “$1” MyFileName$(date +%s).pdf

$1 is a reference to the input PDF file that Hazel is processing, while %s yields number of seconds since “UNIX epoch” began, so it’s a good intermediate filename that Hazel can process further.

Hope this helps, and thanks for sharing your workflows! :slight_smile:

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Ah, brilliant - I use Things and made a mental note to set things up this way when Things launched their “add Todos via email” feature but never got around to it… thanks for reminding me to get to this :wink:

@RosemaryOrchard would you be able to share how you got Zapier to post the MPU / Free Agents episodes to Discourse via API?

There are API keys available for Discourse admin, and then I followed the directions in the API documentation. The Zapier Zap itself is the RSS feed of the podcast as input, and a web hook doing a POST as output, simple but effective. The web hook is set to JSON format, with the title, raw, and category fields present - for the category I’m using the ID rather than the name.

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I have two IFTTT/Zaps related to Pocket. One I have already noted — whenever I put something into Pocket I add an item to my Todo list on Todoist so that I remember to read it.

The other is that I have a note in Evernote to which I append an entry containing the title, url, and date of each thing I add t pocket (I could include tags also but i usually don’t tag things when i put them into pocket).

The value of this is that they become part of my Evernote search capability. If I am looking for notes with some keyword, for example, I will also get entries that are in Pocket with that word in the title or url.

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I use Zapier to do a lot.

I use it with my CRM app to move data around, send sms messages with twilio, update slack, stuff like that.

I also use zapier with airtable. Views can be triggers with zapier.

I also use it with Google slides to dynamically create pdfs, images, etc. {{fieldname}} lets you merge in images and text.

You can also use it the pdf output and send it to Google Cloud Print.

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One of my favorite uses of IFFTT is to automatically add all of the posts from certain RSS feeds to Instapaper. I’m very selective about the RSS feeds I do this with, of course, but there are certain feeds on which I read a significant number of the posts (Macstories, Six Colors, Macsparky, Katie before she gave up blogging, etc.). IFFTT sends them all to an Instapaper folder I named “Inbox.” I triage that folder, and leave the stories that look interesting. I then deleted those feeds from my RSS reader, to avoid duplication. I always have great new stuff to read, and its already in, and formatted for, Instapaper.

I’m using a combination of IFTTT and Pushover to get Twitter notifications of problems on my rail/tube commute into London, but restrict these to the days/times when I actually travel rather than getting them 24 x 7 as you would with native Twitter notifications.

I use an IFTTT trigger with a Twitter search of the form:

from:jubileeline exclude:replies exclude:retweets

The associated IFTTT action sends any tweets matching this search to Pushover to deliver as notification to my phone.

I then use Pushover’s quiet hours feature to restrict the times when I actually see these notifications.

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It’s super simple, but I have an IFTTT trigger that adds a line to a spreadsheet every time I walk into or out of my primary client-site. When I need to account for my time, I’ve got a simple and reliable log.

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I’ve setup IFTTT to create Day One entries when I check into a place using Swarm/Foursquare. I find this handy for remembering where I’ve been, not on a day-to-day basis, but more in the “what was that restaurant I ate in when I was in London 2 years ago” way.

The one that gets the most use is a zapier script that uses Email to Things to add tasks from my Todoist inbox to Things.

I regularly use Newton for email, which adds a link back to the email that will open in either iOS or MacOS when you share an email to Todoist. There’s no way to do that with Things. So, to get the email and task into Things, Zapier sends an email to Things that includes the mail URL for Newton.

On the mac, I use Keyboard Maestro to extract the mail URL from Mail.app, add it to the Quick Add window for Thing, and cursor back to the beginning of the entry field.

Does anyone pay for Zapier? I have it setup for a few tasks (I blew out my free 100 tasks easily this month). I am noticing IFTTT has more frequent errors when doing certain tasks, thinking of transitioning fully over to Zapier since it utilizes Omnifocus.

On IFTTT

  • Workflow 1 - Capture data from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, send posts, status updates, or photos that I am into my Day One Journal.
  • Workflow 2 - Convert my favorites in Pocket to PDF and save in Dropbox.
  • Workflow 3 - Send certain blog posts I follow to Evernote (this will changing as I move my notes to DTPO)

On Zapier

  • Convert my favorites in Pocket to PDF and save in Dropbox
  • Audio Project I am working on (Audio uploaded to SoundCloud from those who I follow become a task in Omnifocus for me to review)

I recently upgraded to Zapier Pro (the lowest plan) to automate some things for posting Automators things around! And I’ve set up a few other things too. What I really like is the ability to do multiple Xs based on Y, and add extra ifs inside of it as required. I quite like having things like a push notification of Git commits as well as an email with more details for my shared repos :wink:

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I also pay for Zapier (though an older grandfathered plan) - 20 zaps total. I use all of them.

I do a huge amount with AirTable records - taking them and turning them into tasks from Asana depending on ‘views’, etc - (using AirTable forms to collect Data).

I also have a lot of things built to give notifications in Slack via lot’s of different scenarios/places (DropBox, Instagram, etc).

Zapier is really pretty impressive. I always try and use IFTTT first - but the level of specifics you can get from Zapier is 10x.

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I built a system for automated workout reminders.

My girlfriend got a workout schedule from a physical therapist. In order to help her keep up with the schedule, I built an automated system for reminders, which is based on IFTTT.

7:00 am one every day when she’s scheduled for a workout she receives a messege in Telegram with instructions for her cardio and strength exercises of the day.

The message is sent from IFTTT which monitors her Google Calendar for events that include a certain tag.

The Google calendar currently holds 63 events, so in order to populate it, I used Workflow.app as follows:

  • I transferred the schedule, which was handed to my gf as a pdf, to a Google Sheets document manually by copying and pasting.
  • I downloaded the contents of the Sheet as a cab file to ICloud Drive
  • I used Workflow.app to parse the csv file and add events to my gf’s calendar.

Now she can’t blame me for not reminding her :wink:

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