My automated life with NFC and IFTTT

NFC

If you’re either lazy, highly organised or interested in new technologies then this post is for you. I’m currently experimenting with three very cool technologies which work with my smartphone and other devices. The three areas I’m looking at are…

  • Wireless charging
  • NFC tags
  • IFTTT automation

Basically at the end of the process I should be able to do things like simply placing my phone on my bedside unit and it will do the following: charge wirelessly, set my alarm, reduce the volume of the phone, dim the screen, switch off Bluetooth and do pretty much anything else I want it to do. No wires or clicks required. If this sounds like witchcraft to you, read on.

Wireless charging
I recently read an article on Pocket-lint on wireless charging and there was a video by someone who had integrated a wireless charger into his bedside unit so that at bedtime he just had to place his mobile phone on the unit and it would start charging. No fumbling around for a cable. And to top it off, the beside unit he used is the exact same one that I have. I will have to buy a wireless charger but I’m up for getting one and trying it out.

NFC tags
NFC tags have been around for a while, in things like Oyster travel cards in London. They are now, however, really cheap and easy to use and can be used with more and more smartphones. A colleague of mine at LEWIS PR bought some from Amazon and I think they were only about £1 each. They came as a simple sticker and look quite cool (see image at the top of this post). They’re about the size of a 50p coin. I downloaded an app called NFC Task Launcher (no longer available at this link but I believe it is now called Trigger) which lets you make a Task. This can be anything such as switching WiFi or Bluetooth on, changing the volume, setting an alarm or checking into FourSquare. Anything you can do on your phone you can create a task for. You can also create multiple actions in a Task. When you then simply place your phone next to that NFC chip these tasks are performed automatically. For example if you had one in your car you could set it to automatically change your phone settings to increase the volume and switch on Bluetooth whenever you placed your phone on the dashboard or wherever. No wires or buttons. You just need to place your phone near the NFC tag.

IFTTT automation
IFTTT has been around for a few years. If This Then That. A simple programming concept to create chain tasks that automate when you do stuff online. For example when you favourite a picture on Instagram it can update your Facebook status and also save a copy of the photo to your DropBox. Or if someone mentions you on Twitter you can add it to a spreadsheet on Google Drive. You can mix and match actions to create your own ‘recipes’. But this month they have taken this to the next level and entered the physical world. You can buy real world devices which work with IFTTT such as switches and motion sensors. You can sync a weather website to automatically work out when the sun sets and this then switches on your lights at home. Or set an alarm to automatically switch on your main bedroom light at a certain time each morning. Or if someone walks into your child’s bedroom it could automatically send you a text. I could go on. And on.

The combinations of all the above are endless, and they aren’t just gimmicky. This is actual helpfulness to make our lives easier. You could combine the above to have a unit in the hall of your house that when you come home from work you place your phone on the unit and it starts charging, checks you in on FourSquare, switches on WiFi, turns your lights on in the house, sends your wife a text that you’re home and starts playing music on your Bluetooth speakers.

The possibilities are endless. If you can think of a mundane electronic task you have to do it can probably be automated in some way. The problem is that the time I save will probably be spent thinking of more cool ways to use this tech. Time well spent I reckon.

Got any other cool ideas for using this tech? Let me know in the comments.

My Productivity Tools

Productivity

There’s been quite a bit of buzz recently about Mailbox and how it will revolutionise people’s inboxes. Email most certainly is broken and any way to improve is good in my book. Looks like Microsoft have also made very good ground with Outlook.com, their impressive Hotmail-killer.

Productivity has been a hot topic for a while and is certainly one that is close to my heart. I’ve tried numerous ways to better organise my life and work over the years and recently some apps or methods have really started to stick. So for all you other productiphiles here you go…

NEWS AND BOOKMARKING
I subscribe to news feeds via Google Reader and on the way into work (or just any time I’m standing around with nothing to do) I’ll skim all these news headlines using the gReader Pro app on my phone. This app is clean, light and fast. Great for skimming headlines. If any of the headlines spark my interest I will star it. Then when I’m more able to read an article in full I will load up Feedly which is synced up with my Google Reader account and loads the starred headlines in its Saved for Later section. This can be on my desktop, preferably on my iPad on the sofa, or on my phone when I have more time or a better signal than on the train commute. I really like the Feedly reader and personally hugely prefer it to Flipboard. I find Flipboard not structured enough. I always prefer having an overview of all my stories and Feedly has a list view and a thumbnail view but both are on pages with unlimited scrolling. And lastly, when I find something that I want to keep or that isn’t worth my time reading now but I want to keep it for later then I will save it in my Google Bookmarks. I use this rather than sites like Pocket because I prefer to keep everything in my Google account if I can because it is the lowest common denominator in terms of third party apps being able to sync with it. I also love how easy it is to add a bookmark using the Chrome extension and also easy to browse my categories on my iGoogle page (although I know these are being phased out soon). I literally have hundreds of categories or tags in my Google Bookmarks. I partly use it as a filtering tool and a way to keep my head sane by knowing that I’ve not missed out on an article but I don’t have to digest it right away. I know it’s always there if I need to read it one day in the future. And yes I do backup my Google accounts regularly.

I’ll also scan my main Twitter lists at the end of each day on my phone and anything that links to a big article or a video then I’ll Favourite it and read it properly in the morning. I don’t use Favourite to actually favourite something. I use it as a temporary flag. So I do wish they would rename it. People often thank me for favouriting their tweets but actually I’m just bookmarking it for later.

TO DOS AND LISTS

Lists
This is where I’m most intense. I love making lists and it’s how I organise my life. I make lists of everything under the sun and I store them all on Simplenote. This syncs across all devices and the app that I use for my Android phone is Flick Note. I also have these lists automatically backed up to my Dropbox account.

To Dos
For To Dos I use Wunderlist. Easy to add lists and tasks. Easy to tick them or prioritise or change the order. Also syncs well across all devices.

At work, however, we need something a bit meatier. Something which has multiple users, collaboration, email notifications, calendar sync etc. For this we use Asana. The free version is incredibly powerful and the interface is extremely smooth. At the time of writing they have also just released a new Android app for it too.

And for quick notes or temporary lists at work I use Stickies. I just haven’t worked out how to sync them across my work and home computers though.

WORK PRODUCTIVITY
When I’m working from home I tend to try to work in 1 hour chunks when possible. It lets me get in the zone when working on a design, drafting a proposal or editing a video. But when in the office there are so many distractions and interruptions that 20 mins is much more realistic. If someone asks if you are free for a few mins and you’re in the middle of a 20min slot you can more easily say ‘Give me 10mins’ and then complete your slot. 20 min chunks is also the most granular level I get to for timesheets.

Pomodoro Technique
This certainly can work well to keep you focussed for 20mins and prevent procrastination or social media timesuck. There are many Pomodoro apps out there. I use PomodoroApp. It’s incredible what you can do in 20mins when you put your mind to it.

Getting Things Done
I’ve also read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and personally I think you have to adapt it for your own needs. I use my own version of it, with three main To Do lists and then other sub lists for specific projects.

EMAIL
The two biggest drains on productivity in my opinion are Social Media and Emails. Social Media is the easiest to tame. Be strict by using the Pomodoro technique, switch off notifications on your phone, use apps like Isolator to block everything else out. But email is certainly the most difficult to control. Constantly waiting for that little red flag indicating a new message. Using your inbox as a priority To Do list. Sending yourself email reminders. All these things can just eat up your time. It’s good to have time ignoring email but it can be hard to not check your email for an hour. It depends on the work culture you have and the timescales associated with your sector. Not everyone can be like Tim Ferriss and insist that everyone works around your short windows of checking emails. You can certainly try to encourage better email habits though. Keep it short, don’t CC when you don’t have to and always move the conversation forward with an action or a suggestion for someone to respond to. I try to maintain inbox zero and generally have less than 20 emails in my inbox at any given time and rarely more than 5 at the end of each day. I archive them off into searchable folders, I respond quickly and succinctly where I can and I make relevant notes in my proper project management software.

APPS
I spoke about some of my favourite apps in my recent blog post about my Nexus 4 but here are some of the ones I use to do with productivity.

gReader Pro
Feedly
Wunderlist
Simplenote
Flick note
Chrome
Asana
Stickies
Pomodoro
Google Drive
Google Calendar
Twitter
Dropbox

Some people say it doesn’t matter the platform or the app you use as long as you use it well and you use it consistently, but I do think it’s good to use ones that sync across devices and sync with each other.

I do tend to change my habits, and perhaps that is one of the things that works for me in order to keep things fresh and motivating. I’ll revisit this subject in a year or so and see how much it has changed!