9 amazing IFTTT recipes to shave hours off your work week

Running a small business is hectic work! On top of operating within your wheelhouse, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by admin-y things like to do lists, appointments, paying the bills and keeping your online presence up to scratch. What if there was a way to ‘set and forget’ these processes to run automatically in the background? Well there is and it’s called IFTTT!

Why you need IFTTT

If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a service that can be used to automate those annoying everyday tasks that tend to add up and eat into our work day. The way it does this is by using a ‘recipe’ system that uses trigger points (“this”) which are followed up with an action (“that”). The Mac Mechanic uses this for streamlining our social media workflow, general time keeping and boosting productivity. Here we have some recipes that we have found most useful for small business.

Social media:

– Use this recipe to automatically add recently published WordPress blog posts to your Buffer queue for distribution to Facebook or Twitter.

– Want your profile pic to be consistent? Use this recipe to auto update your Twitter profile pic whenever you update it on Facebook.

– Make sharing cool and interesting links easier by using this recipe to send posts from your RSS feed into your Buffer queue.

– Running a promotion for most likes? Use this recipe to record all Instagram likes to a spreadsheet on Google Drive. A really great way to track and reward your biggest fans and followers!

Reminders:

– Never miss another payment due date again with this recipe that will send you a reminder text message when your bills are due.

– Use Siri’s speak notes to record ideas or tasks to do on the fly? This recipe will convert it into Evernote and set an iOS reminder for follow up.

– Create a follow up reminder whenever you star an email in Gmail.

– Like to track your progress when smashing through your to do list? This recipe will log all of your completed goals in Google calendar.

– Make your phone battery last longer with this recipe that will automatically turn off power zapping WiFi whenever you switch on mobile data.

Get Cooking!

These are really just the tip of the iceberg as far as recipes goes. You can also head over to ifttt.com for a plethora of recipes and components to create your own. Once you get your head around the way it works you will wonder how you ever got by without it.