My friend, Mike Kim, & I sat down and had a great chat about IFTTT in this podcast guest episode, “Productivity Tip #3 – IFTTT: An Interview With Mike Kim”.
Click the video below to listen to it (Audio only).
Transcript of Productivity Tip #3 – IFTTT: An Interview With Mike Kim
Mike Kim: Welcome to episode 97 of the brand new podcast. This is Mike Kim and you're tuning in the show dedicated to helping you build a profitable, personal brand. I haven't said that line for a while, but, hey, to everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn. All right.
We've been, for the last couple of weeks, talking to my buddy Anil Agrawal from leadershipfocusHQ.com. The feedback has been tremendous, and he's back today to share with us another app, or productivity hack, or tick- What am I saying? Tick? … tactic that'll help us. His recommendations have been extremely helpful to me so let's dive in with Anil, and then we're gonna get to Jennifer.
Okay, we are back with Anil and he is gonna share with us another tip, or productivity hack, or app that's going to make all of our personal brand building efforts much easier. Anil, welcome back, what do you got for us today?
Anil Agrawal: Well, I got another great tool for you, Mike, and everybody out there, which is going to save you a ton of time, and a lot of grief and pain.
Mike Kim: I'm open. Let's save me time and grief.
Anil Agrawal: This one is called IF by IFTTT.
Mike Kim: Okay, so like-
Anil Agrawal: If this then that.
Mike Kim: Oh, okay, so they're real letters. IF and then TTT.
Anil Agrawal: Yes.
Mike Kim: If this then that. That's what it- Oh, okay, all right. I've seen that around, like that … In all capital letters, IFTTT, I've seen that everywhere, and I'm like, “What is that?”
Anil Agrawal: Yes. Yes.
Mike Kim: Okay, so tell us about it.
Anil Agrawal: It's amazing because it's actually a free tool by the way.
Mike Kim: Oh, nice. Okay.
Anil Agrawal: Right. What it does is it's based on what's called recipe. If something happens, then do this.
Mike Kim: Okay, right.
Anil Agrawal: It's a trigger and then action.
Mike Kim: Okay. Where would we use this? Like is it a social media?
Anil Agrawal: For example, you can do … I'm not sure if people have heard about a tool or app called Zapier.
Mike Kim: I've heard of it but, yeah, explain it for …
Anil Agrawal: Zapier also does a similar thing but that's a paid app and it may be more powerful. But what it does is it basically automates things for you.
Mike Kim: Okay.
Anil Agrawal: For example, if you are … The way I use this app is, it's just one example, I don't want to see or keep on checking my emails all day or so many times during the day. So what I do is, what you can do is, with this app, is you set up a recipe and you say using this trigger, which is if an email comes in from Mike Kim about his mastermind meeting, I want to know this because I don't want to keep checking my emails. Did Mike actually send me that email or not? I can set up a recipe that, if I receive an email in my Gmail tool, from this person, with certain subject line or whatever keywords, and then send me a text message on my cell phone.
Mike Kim: Dude, my mouth is wide open. Okay, so, all right. I have all these ideas. Okay, so I can set this up so that I don't check my email and I get a text message only if, like let's say, my assistant emails me? I just trigger her email address and then it'll text me that she emailed me?
Anil Agrawal: Yes.
Mike Kim: Oh my gosh.
Anil Agrawal: You could really … This gets really, really powerful. It's amazing. I'm not … I don't think I'm using even 1% of its power in terms of what things that I could automate and help me save time and grief.
Mike Kim: How do I hook this up? Is it an app that I install on my phone? Is it a plug-in on my computer? How do I connect it to Gmail or something like that?
Anil Agrawal: This one, it's an app. I believe it's on Android as well as iOS devices. Your iPhone … I don't think it's for Mac, I don't think it's available for Mac, and you probably don't need that. When you're mobile, you're out and about, you always have your iPhone or some smartphone with you, so it's an app. When you go in the app, you actually start to build the recipe. So you start with looking at … There are a whole bunch of trigger apps or kind of an ingredient, which is let's say a Gmail, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Evernote.
Mike Kim: Oh my gosh, this is crazy. Okay. Okay.
Anil Agrawal: What you do is you select one trigger related app, which is, in this case, let's say Gmail. And you provide your … you have to connect it, so you provide your login information for that app, in this case, Gmail. Once it's connected, now it's available to you so that it can read from your Gmail account, right?
Mike Kim: Right. Okay.
Anil Agrawal: And then you say … You select any keywords, or you specify the subject line or the sender email address, and you enter that and then you build the next step, which is the action. What action do you want it to take? And then you say, oh … Then you find that ingredient within this app, which is, in this case, my phone, or SMS, or something like that, I've forgotten exactly what it's called.
Mike Kim: Crazy. Okay. While we were talking, I downloaded the app. This is so insane. You guys gotta get this. This is crazy. All right. So you used it, like in this example, for email and then if you got an email from somebody with a certain subject line or keyword, it texted you. I'm seeing some of these other things like if I take an Instagram photo, then I set up a description to automatically save that photo to my Dropbox account. That's insane.
Anil Agrawal: Yeah. This is crazy. Crazy stuff.
Mike Kim: Here's another. This is a little creepy, I don't know if I would do this, but if I'm nearly home, IFTTT can send a direct message through Twitter to my wife. That's insane.
Anil Agrawal: Yes, and actually I've tried, not through the Twitter, but I've tried that you could actually send a text message to your wife, for example, that, “Hey, I've left work.”
Mike Kim: Oh, okay.
Anil Agrawal: So if you go a certain … If you're beyond … I go to my work, and before I'm leaving, I don't have to do anything.
Mike Kim: Right.
Anil Agrawal: And I go beyond a circle of … it's a zone or whatever they call it, I forget now. Once I'm out of that zone, I can specify that zone by the way, and then it will automatically text my wife that I've left work.
Mike Kim: Oh my gosh, that's so crazy. All right. All you guys that want to go to the bar after work though, you'd better not use that trigger.
Anil Agrawal: Yeah.
Mike Kim: Honey, where were you? I was [crosstalk 00:07:36].
Anil Agrawal: Exactly, I turned it off by the way.
Mike Kim: I was at work late. Uh, no, IFTTT told me. Freaking IFTTT.
Anil Agrawal: Exactly, you turn that recipe off. You pause that recipe.
Mike Kim: I'll use that for flights, like when I get close to the airport. Okay. All right. This is awesome. I can not wait to play around with this. Anil, thank you, this is an amazing tip.
All right, that was a lot of fun with Anil. You gotta be careful what you automate, right? Don't want to get in trouble with the family.
NOTE: If you missed out on my previous productivity tips, check them out… Productivity Tip #1 and Productivity Tip #2