Automation is becoming one of the top things we need to get our heads around as business owners.
As entrepreneurs and business owners we’re forever busy and it can feel like our to-do list gets bigger and bigger every day. Do you ever just feel like screaming?!
But there is a way out and there are some awesome – and free – tools and apps out there that we can use to make our everyday lives easier as entrepreneurs, by getting the internet to automatically do our work for us.
Automation is becoming one of the top things we need to get our heads around as business owners, and I have found a brilliant tool that you can use to start automating and systemising some of your practices that take up your time every day at the moment.
Watch this video for a demo:
This free-of-charge tool is called IFTTT which stands for ‘If This, Then That’.
What it basically does, is it allows you to set up automatic ‘recipes’, meaning that you can tell this system to follow certain instructions and do things for you automatically. You can tell the system that if ‘X’ happens, then you want ‘Y’ to happen – and the fun bit is that ‘X’ and ‘Y’ could be pretty much anything!
For example, you could say to it something like, ‘IF somebody follows me on Twitter, THEN send them an automatic “thank you” reply.’
I have created this very recipe in an automation app called IFTTT so that when somebody follows me on Twitter, they will get an automatic instant message that says, ‘love having you on Twitter! Are we connected on LinkedIn and Facebook?’
As a result, I now get anything from five to 30 connect requests on my LinkedIn every day for doing absolutely NOTHING! Cool huh?!
That’s just one of the recipes you can use. Another one might be, ‘IF I mark an email as “to-do” in my emails, THEN set it as a reminder or task in my calendar.’
The recipes are endless!
Give it a go and see how much time you save and how much your results go up.
Sarah Cordiner, CEO, MainTraining / Founder, Edupreneur Awards
