Making the Internet be the PA you will never have...

IFTTT (If This > Then That) is a tool that creates recipes. A recipe is something that happens as a result of a 'trigger' such as when you Dial 111 from your phone a Text Message is sent to your partner.

The 'digital eco-system' you use will dictate exactly what recipes you can use.
As a Google Apps/Blogger/EverNote/Android user, I have found the following recipes - that have taken seconds to set up - save me the most time.

 
1. Photos taken in the area of my school (from my phone) get saved to my Google Drive account. If you take a lot of photos this recipe is great as it means you can safely delete any 'school photos' on your phone, knowing they will be accessible in the cloud. I used to tell people (but always forgot myself) to open their Google Drive App and take photos from within the App - this recipe eliminates the need to remember!

 
2. When a Google Form is submitted, receive a text message. This is a 3 step recipe. When you create a Google Form a Response spreadsheet is automatically created to collect all responses. Within this spreadsheet, go to Tools> Notification Rules and decide the frequency you want to have responses emailed. You then need to look at one of the reminder emails about this event and copy an exact string of unique words into the 'search' box of this recipe. 

I use this with our 'IT Helpdesk' and could imagine it being used for absentees.

 
3. When a specific event is about to happen, get a text reminder. I love Google Calendar SMS reminders, but recently Google announced that they will soon be ceased https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/45351?hl=en
I am finding this recipe works great as it only reminds me of events I tell it to - ones that I add a #DF (Don't Forget to). You could equally set up a recipe that reminds you of all events on your calendar - depending on how fill your calendar is this may be a bad idea!

 
4. When you leave the area of your work, send a text message. Stop texting while juggling laptops, books and car keys and get IFTTT to do it for you :)



5. IFTTT works a treat with Twitter. You can set up recipes for IFTTT to filter tweets from a specific user, #hashtag or with links. Adding -RT to the end of your search string (after a space) removes any retweets. Here is an example from:username #tag filter:links -RT. A great research method!