I’ve been using lockdown to really optimise my personal and professional routines often with automation. Most of these will be very mundane for users of this forum but as I’ve only seen very little discussion on here I thought it was worth calling out the central importance of Integromat in some of these.
From a philosophical point of view I want to have one place to manage this all and minimise my dependency on devices. Also, inspired by @Kutrinet’s I want to track as much of my life as possible to help identify trends and opportunities for further improvement. This definitely favours web-based solutions especially considering how painful it is to edit shortcuts on iOS. For me, Integromat is now approaching the utility of Keyboard Maestro (albeit without the great community around that product) but in the cloud.
Whilst I’ve dabbled with Zapier and IFTT before it never really clicked because half the services I want to integrate with aren’t represented - Strava, Oura, Home Assistant, Timing (I know it’s on Zapier now). They are not on Integromat either but the key is you can actually build your own integrations (“apps” in their language). Whilst this is definitely more complex than point and click in my case, a little bit of cut and pasting from the developer documentation with some trial and error means I know have custom apps for all these use cases that I can share if wanted or with a bit more work publish for everyone. Some examples that might inspire people:
- Strava - webhook to PushCut to get me to enter details about my latest run into a log in Airtable and then create a Day One entry with all the stats on my iPhone for anything I want to add.
- Timing - Daily refresh of all my client billable hours into monthly timesheets in Airtable
- Timing - Automatically start a task when I leave the house or more importantly stop and client billable items
- Oura - Daily update of sleep data into Airtable
Please let me know if anyone is interested in hearing more and I can detail here.
