Are you spending too much of your time burrowed away in the office?
Did you waste more hours at your desk in December than you did in
November? Just how much overtime pay does your boss owe you? Keeping a
log of your work hours can be helpful for all kinds of reasons and you
can automate the whole process using your phone and IFTTT.
Getting started
If you’ve never come across IFTTT before then you’re going to need to
sign up for a free account
through the web interface. It’s an invaluable tool for connecting
different websites, apps and services together; save Instagram photos to
Dropbox, get weather reports over text, save starred Gmail messages to
Instapaper. The possibilities are virtually endless.
You’re also going to need to install
the IFTTT app on your iPhone, as this will keep track of where you are during the day. You can run the same recipe using
the IFTTT app for Android,
though in this article we’re sticking to iOS specifics for the sake of
simplicity. But basically for an Android phone, just choose
Android location instead of
iOS Location when making the recipe; everything else is largely the same.
We’d also recommend creating a separate Google calendar for IFTTT to
use, otherwise your main one is going to get a little cluttered with
timestamps. From the online interface you can do this via the drop-down
menu next to your current calendars. All you need to do is put in a name
(“IFTTT” or similar) and the default options should work fine for
everything else. Add in a description if you really think you’re going
to forget why this calendar is here.
Creating the trigger
Once you’re logged into IFTTT on the web, click
Create a Recipe. You want to choose
iOS Location
as your trigger, at which point you’ll be prompted to activate the
channel. Switch to the IFTTT app on your iPhone and tap the mortar and
pestle icon followed by the cog icon. This gets you to the settings
screen where you can tap
Channels and
iOS Location
to activate the feature. You’re going to need to give permission for
IFTTT to access your location even when the app’s not running.
Back on the web you should now see three options: entering an area,
exiting an area or both. You can tweak the recipe as you wish, but in
this case we’re going to choose
You enter or exit an area.
There will be the opportunity later to attach a label to the timestamp
that indicates whether you were coming to or going from your office.
The next step is to pinpoint the location of your workplace: Use the
search field, the zoom buttons and the panning options to find it. Click
Create Trigger and you’re all set to move on to the
next stage — the IFTTT recipe will run whenever you go into or come out
of the area you’ve specified (assuming your iPhone is reporting your
location correctly).
Creating the action
For your action channel, choose
Google Calendar.
Again, you’ll need to activate the channel if you haven’t already done
so. This is simply a question of entering your Google credentials when
prompted and giving IFTTT permission to access your calendars.
It’s at this point you’ll be asked to choose a specific calendar for
IFTTT to use, so pick the one you set up earlier. Unfortunately you can
only use one calendar across all of your recipes, so that may interfere
with some of your other ideas, but it’s a limitation you’ll have to live
with for now.
There’s only one action to choose —
Quick add event — and you can then customise the calendar entries as you like. The
OccurredAt field will put a time stamp on the entry and
EnteredOrExited
will mark whether you’re coming or going. If you like, you can even
attach the map URL, though it will always show your workplace. Click
Create Action and you’re just about done.
The beauty of IFTTT is you can adapt your recipes in many different
ways. You could pipe your working hours into a Google Drive spreadsheet,
for example, or log time spent at the beach rather than in the office.
The same functionality can be used to let you ping others when you’ve
got home, and so on.
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