How I track my life with Integromat, Airtable, Shortcuts and Timing (et al)

Web
1

Hey guys, I noticed that there aren’t that many (recent) posts about Integromat, so I thought I’ll write a quick overview of my tracking system that partly relies on Integromat.

Background: I’m a 44-year-old mother of two sons (6 and 9), a working screenwriter and a new doctoral student. I’m diagnosed with ADHD and take meds for it. My working memory has been always bad (because of the ADHD), but after I slept very little for the first 6 years of my motherhood, my ability to remember events and details that aren’t exciting and interesting has gotten even worse.

I’ve learned to use calendar and todo-list quite efficiently, so the future events haven’t been a problem for a while. What is still awful, is that I don’t remember details of past events well enough. This lead me to often feel that I didn’t get anything done and to wonder where my time had gone. I also listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks and remember what is said in them, but can’t remember who said what and in which podcast. So, if I wanted to share the podcast with someone else, it took me a long time to figure out where I heard about it.

My solution: tracking EVERYTHING I do to an Airtable database.

This includes (collection method in parenthesis):

  • How much I sleep (Oura ring + iOS Health + Shortcuts)
  • My recovery data (Oura ring + Integromat)
  • Physical activity (Fitbit versa + Integromat)
  • Weight and blood pressure (Withings Wifi Scale and Blood pressure monitor + Health App + Shortcuts)
  • My food intake, incl. protein, fat, carbs and fiber (MyFitnessPal + Fitbit + Integromat)
  • My handwritten diaries as OCR’d text and PDF (reMarkable Tablet + Shortcuts + DropShare + Gmail + Integromat)
  • My Meditations with notes and quotes (Calm app + Dropshare + Shortcuts + Integromat + Google Cloud vision)
  • Podcasts I’ve listened (Overcast + Shortcuts)
  • My comments on Podcasts including the location I’m commenting (Overcast + Shortcuts)
  • Audiobooks I’ve listened (Audible app + Shortcuts)
  • My comments on Audiobooks including the location I’m commenting (Audible app + Shortcuts)
  • Receipts from stores (Pushcut + Scanbot + Dropshare + Shortcuts + Integromat + Google Cloud Vision)
  • My Twitter activity (Twitter + Integromat)
  • My Facebook activity (Facebook + Integromat)
  • My Instagram activity (Instagram + Integromat)
  • YouTube videos I’ve uploaded (YouTube + Integromat)
  • My morning plans and evening reviews (Shortcuts)
  • When I leave/enter certain key locations (Integromat)
  • Any thoughts, ideas etc. I have during the day (Shortcuts)
  • My medication (Shortcuts)
  • New Calendar events – both when I put them in the calendar and when they’re taking place (Integromat)
  • New iOS reminders (Integromat)
  • Any PDF or Image I want to store in Airtable, OCR’d if needed (Dropshare + Shortcuts + Integromat + Google Cloud Vision)

I track my time with Timing app (the new web version has made it even more AWESOME!!!). I use Shortcuts to start timers and at the same time make a note to my Airtable database that I’ve started a timer.

I have a couple of Timing timers that Integromat starts/stops at a certain time and lets me know via Pushcut that the timer has stopped/started. Integromat also sends me once an hour a message through Pushcut, where it says what Timing timer is running and asks if I want to keep that timer running or start a new timer. If I want to stop the timer or start a new one, I can start a Shortcut that does show straight from the Pushcut notification.

I would love to tell you more about my automations, but I have to start to put my kids to bed. If you’re interested to hear more about some of these automations, let me know and I’ll tell you more about it when I have another free moment. :smiley:

Here’s an image from one of my favorite Integromat solutions - the one that uploads and attachment to Airtable (from Dropshare) and then does OCR if I want to.

Kuvan_lataus_ja_tekstin_tunnistus_Airtableen___Integromat
Kuvan_lataus_ja_tekstin_tunnistus_Airtableen___Integromat.png2100×1152 272 KB

24 Likes
2

Oh and what I love about Integromat is that visual interface, that is soooo much easier to understand for my ADHD-brain than the Zapier interface. For my use, Integromat is much cheaper too ($9 vs $20), and since I’m European, I really appreciate that it’s a European company that obeys GDPR-rules. (I wasn’t unfortunately paid for this endorsement. :smile: )

3

I’m not sure what Integromat is. I also have ADD. I would be interested in hearing about some of your shortcuts you use.

4

It’s a web based integration platform in the same vain as IFTTT and Zapier. It has come up in a number of discussion threads.

https://talk.automators.fm/search?context=topic&context_id=5507&q=Integromat&skip_context=true

5

Sorry, my bad, I should have included links. :woman_facepalming:t3:

https://integromat.com/

I’ll write about my shortcuts more later this week.

6

This makes me happy on so many levels. Well done!

I would love to read more about the other automations you have created (the Oura Ring specifically).

Whenever you have time, many of us would gain value from reading further :nerd_face:

Also, would love to learn how you’re connecting data points like Oura and My Fitness Pal to Integromat specifically.

2 Likes
7

As the creator, it makes me really happy to read how Pushcut is helping you with your automation here.
I think your entire setup is a great inspiration, and I hope to learn more about it all soon ; )

Thank you for sharing this!

1 Like
8

Wow, cool. I’ve seen Integromat mentioned before, but without the context of seeing how it can be used, it fell into the pile of “online services that get bookmarked to look into some day.”

Thanks for this. Very interesting.

9

That sounds great. I’d love to hear about your shortcuts, especially for Overcast and Audible as I use these almost daily.

10

I feel like you should be brought on to the podcast to talk about this :wink:

5 Likes
11

Hey Guys!

I am Wayne from Integromat. Glad to see that you all are interested in learning more about how Integromat works.

Here is a link to a quick intro video: https://youtu.be/OExHVQ9CRCw

We have also created some introduction courses that will definitely provide you with useful info: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrED3I754Lhm4atxOK76-RbyOHKjMb0_u

Let me know if you have any questions!

2 Likes
12

Can you share these shortcuts or tell me about them?

13

Yeah I’d also love to see some of these automations.
In particular re you doing anything interesting with your Twitter activity?

14

haha - every search results is coming from this thread!

15

That’s really strange! It definitely didn’t do that previously.

There certainly are other threads. For example…

This site specific Google search doesn’t return anything at all :frowning:

All very strange.

1 Like
16

So I did a quick bit of tinkering and I think this should be the current list of threads where Integromat is mentioned in some way. I hope that helps.

4 Likes
17

Love this thread! I’m a big Integromat fan – use it more for work than personal – and am happy to vouch for it as a service.

One thing that’s a big deal for me is that any run failures can be inspected really easily, so data is never lost in the event of a problem. And their support team is great.

@Kutrinet I’m really intrigued about your setup in general, although specifically I’d love to hear about your Airtable setup – do you have different bases for different life areas, or a master base with lots of interconnected tables, etc?

18

I’m new to this forum and Integromat! I actually found this while trying to figure out how to integrate MyFitnessPal with Airtable so that it could pull in my calories tracked on there. I couldn’t figure out how to do it…

@Kutrinet, how’d you get it set up and working??

19

Count me as also interested in hearing more!

20

Hello again, sorry it took me this long to get back to you. My ADHD/Momdementia made me forgot about this thread. I’ll have now 1.5 hours to write about my setup, so let’s see how far I’ll get.

I guess it would be easiest for me to describe my various automations in the order I use them throughout the day.

I’ll write a separate message of each step of my day, so that if my browser crashes, I won’t lose too much info.

I’m writing this with my laptop so that I can type with all my 10 fingers and will add the screencaptures etc. from my phone later.

My phone, shortcuts and most apps use Finnish, so I might not know all the right terms/words, and some of my screencaptures might not make sense to you. Knowing myself I’m afraid that if I’ll begin to search for right terms, translate my shortcuts etc., it will take me so much time, that I will give up. So let’s agree that done is better than perfect, OK?

So let’s go.

6 Likes