As a lifelong person of paper, I’ve always consigned the pertinent details of my life to an ever-scattering wake of scribbled-upon receipts and scraps. And while it’s an issue that started long before the Internet entered my life, it wasn’t for lack of available solutions.
Mixed in with those papers lost to the past is a trail of unused calendars and unfilled Filofaxes, neglected day planners and empty Rolodexes, half-used notebooks and every possible pad from memo to steno. The technology for getting my act together has always been there, but the obstacle is obvious: I just don’t wanna.
This condition persists today, at a time when the selection of business and productivity apps has never been richer — the industry is estimated to reach $58 billion by 2016.
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Stuffed in among my social media portals, chat services, and camera apps, my phone packs an arsenal of organizational tools fit to launch its own town: For storage and sharing I’ve got Box and Dropbox; for team tasks and project planning I’ve got Trello and Basecamp; for notes and to-dos, I’ve got Evernote and Wunderlist; and because they sounded cool I’ve downloaded Slack and Talko. One day, I will open them.
It’s possible that this tendency toward disorganization is some kind of passive protest against the unfulfilled promises of technology. Sure, the conveniences of the digital revolution have flourished in the form of thousands of apps, each with its own specialty, and each refining the runoff from our lives into streams of trackable, sortable, endlessly valuable data. But as useful as they all seem to be, apps still require use. That is, I still have to do stuff. How is that the future?
Apparently, I’m not alone in harboring these George Jetson-esque problems, as a new wave of automation services have been picking up steam online.
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Sites like IFTTT, Zapier, bip.io, CloudWork, and elastic.io allow users to connect applications with links that go beyond a simple synch. Put simply: Any one function can trigger just about any other function. Establishing this level of integration between apps once required some skilled back-end development work and manipulation of various APIs (application programming interfaces), but the desire for apps to operate more like a well-trained staff than a rowdy gang of independent contractors has gone mainstream.
IFTTT — pronounced “ift” and shorthand for the conditional proposition of the site, “If This Then That” — is built upon a system of “recipes,” which are sequences of triggering events (the “this”) and resultant actions (the “that”).
So far, IFTTT connects about 141 different applications and hosts nearly 15,000 pages of user-created recipes, sorted by newness, popularity, and grouped into themed collections geared toward various locations (arrive in New York and your GPS can trigger an e-mail with a subway map), interests (space junkies can receive NASA notifications on Google Glass whenever ISS passes overhead), and social media busywork (you can grab a copy of any Facebook photo you’re tagged in and tuck it away in your Dropbox).
Like any wide-open proposition, it’s hard to imagine the power of “if this then that” until you see how others have put it to use.
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Some recipes have already established themselves as “all time” favorites (like backing up your contacts to a Google spreadsheet, or getting a push notification if it’s going to rain, or triggering a phone call by texting “helpme” to allow sudden exit from particularly bleak social situations). But others just signal the clever ways we’re finding to take full advantage of the Internet by getting it out of our faces.
One recipe will dim the automated lights in your house once your Fitbit senses you’ve fallen asleep. Another will tirelessly compile a log of Red Sox scores in a Google Spreadsheet. Another will nudge your ringer volume back up once you leave work. Another lets you know if your Wi-Fi cuts out so you don’t burn through your data plan. Others are set up to track job openings, apartments, and gadget prices.
And its reach is extending into the much-trumpeted Internet of Things. Anything from a thermostat to a motion sensor to tiny custom plug-and-play electronics can be integrated, controlled, and more or less forgotten about.
Spend a little while setting up these intricate virtual Rube Goldberg contraptions behind the scenes of your digital life and you’ll soon find yourself liberated from the burdens of simul-posting, the embarrassments of forgetfulness, and the constant pull of your phone on your attentions. You’ll find yourself newly uncluttered, unfettered, free.
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Or you’ll find yourself once again lost, this time in the endless dorky joys of personal meta-engineering.
Right now I’m working on a recipe that corrals every “Twin Peaks” animated GIF into a gallery so I can devote less time to hunting them down; and another that will tint the living room purple whenever Prince uploads a new track; and I’ve prepped about a dozen heartfelt anniversary texts that should have me covered until 2026, provided we still text.
There are so many possibilities to explore in this wireless life, so much work still to be done for so much ease. But today, when I can theoretically order a large pizza just by falling onto the couch, it seems safe to say it: The future is now.
Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.