If you’ve read many of my articles, then you’ll know that I have a long-standing love of technology, from my dad bringing home an Apple II computer when I was only six or seven, to being gifted a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K+ computer when I was (I think) 11, to my degree in Computing Science, a career in programming (both professionally and as a hobbyist) and ten year teaching IT to 11 year olds all the way up to adults.
And yeah. I consider myself to be a geek/nerd and I’m very proud of it.
I’ve written articles about using technology to support your self-help and personal development journey, most lately about how you can use the Internet of Things or Alexa-type devices to motivate and organise yourself.
I’m a big believer in taking the best aspects of technology and harnessing them for your benefit. I also believe in moderation when it comes to technology which is addictive, such as endorphin-activating games. That’s maybe a post for another time.
I think that we can draw a lot of inspiration from the world of technology, and bring it into our own lives.
I realised the other day that I’ve been using the principle of IFTTT in my everyday life, without even realising that was what I was doing.
What is IFTTT?
IFTTT is a company, which allows people to set up automations. IFTTT stands for ‘If this, then that’. It allows companies like Alexa to interact with the APIs of smart devices (application programming interface), which is a kind of contract or list of possible actions that the device can do, if you connect it and authorise the interaction.
It might sound complicated, but there’s a good chance that you’re already using it if you have any internet-enabled devices or smart devices in your home.
If you have a robot vacuum cleaner, for example, you might have set up a schedule for it to come on and to hoover your home, on certain days at a certain time. I do. I set it up through my Alexa, and while the routine looks like this:
You could phrase it in this way:
If it’s Monday, Wednesday or Friday and it’s 8am, turn on the hoover
Yes, my hoover is named Kryten. After the character on the marvellous show Red Dwarf.
I have similar routines set up for my smart light bulbs, my bedroom heater, my heating, controlled via a device wired to my boiler called a Tado, and a few other things. It means that a lot of the stuff in my home runs without me having to worry about it. When I get up in the morning, my lights are on. My heating comes on between 7 in the morning and 8 at night, and keeps my little house a comfortable 17 degrees, during the winter and colder months.
Which leaves me free to get on with other things. That’s the most important thing about all of this. The automation frees you to focus on more important stuff. For me, that’s my coaching, and writing, whether it’s books or articles like this, to help other people to work towards living the life of their dreams.
How does this relate to my own life?
So, that’s all very well. But I’m not necessarily suggesting you go out and buy a load of Internet-enabled things. You may not have the resources or the inclination to do that.
What I’m suggesting is that in order to automate some of the more mundane, menial chores in your life, you can use IFTTT as inspiration.
I started doing that without realising what I was doing, a long time ago.
After my marriage ended in 2008, I lived alone in a little flat, while I was working as a secondary school teacher. While there’re massive benefits to working in teaching (14 weeks of paid holiday a year is absolutely not to be sniffed at), there are downsides, namely the low pay, high stress, long working hours and the lack of time and energy you tend to have during the week in term time.
Many weekday nights, it was all I could do to eat as healthily as I could and then try to destress a little bit before crashing into bed, exhausted.
The last thing I wanted to do was to spend my precious weekends cleaning my home.
So, I started a little thing I called ‘Tidy Thursdays’. Sounds hokey, I know, but bear with me.
I was only living in a 2-bedroom flat, one bedroom of which was taken up with my home gym equipment, and as I was living alone, it wasn’t as if I had a huge mess to clean up every week.
But I found that keeping on top of it was the best way to go.
So that I had Friday night and all of the weekend entirely free to do what I wanted to do, whether it was visiting friends, or going on a date or just curling up on the sofa for a reading marathon or a film binge, I committed to cleaning my little flat, changing my bed and doing all of my washing on a Thursday night after work.
Did I always want to do it? And did I always manage to? Hell, no. I’m human. But the carrot for me was that I knew that if I did it, I could put my feet up for a whole week, just keeping on top of the dishes and any other little messes that I made, until the next Thursday came around.
I’d put in place an IFTTT routine:
If it’s Thursday night, do the washing, clean the flat and change the bed
I still have routines like that, although now I have ‘Maintenance Monday’ (very similar to the above, without the washing) and ‘Washing Wednesday’ whose name is hopefully self-explanatory!
I also have little routines I run in my head, such as: ‘If I’ve finished eating my food, get up immediately and tidy the kitchen/wash the pots/load the dishwasher’.
Others include:
- If you see something is getting low which you’ll need to buy in next week’s food shopping, add it to your list immediately (It’s on my phone, so usually close at hand)
- If you see something small needs cleaning, sort it out immediately (e.g. a drip on the floor or a spillage on a countertop)
- Self care Sunday: If it’s Sunday, spend time in the evening on personal maintenance stuff (take a bath, do a face mask, etc.)
I’m sure I have a few more which I can’t think of immediately off the top of my head. Some have cute, alliterative names, which help me to remember, others don’t. But they all follow that ‘if <trigger> then <action>’ format
Do I always do these things? Nope. Again, I’m human. I get tired, I get ill, I lack motivation sometimes. But they happen more often than not.
While I have routines, there’s some flexibility there. If I have a busy day on a Monday or a Wednesday, I just do the cleaning or the washing the day after or before I would have ordinarily.
And I don’t beat myself up about it.
I’m not a slave to these things, they’re not hard and fast rules, not sticks to beat myself with, just suggestions which I know work for me and which mean that the more boring things — the kind of stuff that you have to keep on top of or else they all pile on top of you — get done without me having to think about them at all, leaving me free to think about stuff like this post and my coaching.
Would it help you to set up some IFTTT routines in your own life?
Let me know in the comments if you already have some, even if you’re just now realising that you do and you haven’t necessarily named them! I’d love to hear about them, and they could serve as inspiration for other folks, too.
