5 shortcuts that will make your life easier

5 shortcuts that will make your life easier


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SALT LAKE CITY — Out of all the online services available today, here are some of our favorites.

These are five time-saving "shortcuts" — clever uses of technology that can make things easier or save us time.

Use IFTTT to be notified of sales

IFTTT ("if this then that") is an online service that allows you to connect to other online services. With IFTTT you can create what they call "recipes," which are formulas with a trigger and an action. For example, you can say, "If I receive an email from my spouse, send me a text message." The trigger is the email, and the action is sending a text message. A lengthier explanation is available at its website.

There are many useful pre-made recipes available to browse and use at IFTTT.com. Some of the most popular recipes are for being notified of sales.

Let's say there's an app you would like to have, but not for the $2.99 it normally is. With IFTTT you can create a recipe that watches the price of that app and notifies you when the price changes.

IFTTT can be set up to watch all of your favorite daily deal sites for items you need and notify you if they go on sale. While spending $95 to get your carpets cleaned instead of the normal $215 is a great deal, it can be hard to turn down great deals that you don't need.

"In our growing deal culture it's important that consumers take a step back," said Jordan Amin, chairman of the National CPA Financial Literacy Commission. "When they encounter these offers they need to think through their needs, the actual value of the deals and the financial tradeoffs that come with spending money instead of saving it."

With IFTTT you can be sure you won't miss the deals you need, and won't see as many of the deals you don't.

Use Gmail filters to automatically sort your email

Filters and labels in Gmail (and other email services) are like your own personal secretaries. With a little setup, you can create an automated workflow for sorting and filing your email.

If you're not familiar with how to use filters in Gmail, see this article by PCWorld.

Keeping your inbox organized and uncluttered can help you focus on what is important or time sensitive.

Chelsea Start, of Mashable, said, "Filters are some of the most powerful Gmail tools, serving to keep less important email out of your face and allowing the cream to rise to the top."

For example, a Gmail filter can be set up to automatically label all your monthly newsletters and move them out of your inbox. When you have time to read through some, you can see a list of all your newsletters in your "newsletter" label.

Gmail filters can be used to automatically forward certain types of emails. Perhaps you want all of your Amazon order confirmations sent to your spouse. They can be used to apply labels to all emails from certain people. They can make keeping track of projects easier.

Makeuseof.com can help you set up three productivity-increasing filters.

Use Evernote as your own personal knowledge base

Evernote can be a powerful tool to organizing all of what you have learned into one easily searchable, knowledge base.

Evernote's tagline is "Remember Everything." It provides many ways of inputting bits of information you find useful.

You are able to save Web pages, screen shots, dictated notes and even handwritten notes into your Evernote journals.

Whitson Gordon of Lifehacker.com suggests, "The more you add, the more useful Evernote becomes." His article outlines many ways to get the most out of Evernote.

The magic of Evernote lies in putting as much as you can into it. It indexes all of your journal's content, making it quickly searchable. This can come in handy when you remember reading a great how-to article online — a quick search for a few keywords in Evernote can help you quickly find it again.

Use Dropbox to back up everything

According to Dropbox, more than 50 million people are using its file-syncing services. But did you know Dropbox can be used for much more than simply syncing files across multiple devices?

Dropbox has built-in version control. Version control basically means it keeps a separate copy of a file each time it is modified. With free Dropbox accounts, these files are saved for 30 days.

Let's say you're working on a large, important Word document. Unknown to you, a few pages get deleted (perhaps your 2-year-old had some fun while you were taking a break, perhaps your cat sat on your keyboard). After you've added a few more pages you click save — and you just lost those accidentally deleted pages.

If that file is saved to Dropbox you can recover those lost pages. Just log in to the Dropbox Web page, find the document in question, and restore the last version that had those pages in it. Just make sure you keep a copy of the current file so you can combine the new pages with the old document.

This ability to restore files to previous versions is very valuable and a huge relief those few times you need it.

When combined with IFTTT, Dropbox provides another great backup solution. IFTTT can automatically save all of your data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to your Dropbox. This can give you a great offline copy of all pictures of you from Facebook.

Business Insider lists many more ways you can get the most out of Dropbox.Use Pocket to keep a read-it-later list

If you ever find yourself with 15 or 20 minutes to kill, having a read-it-later list ready to go can be great.

Pocket is a service that lets you save articles or Web pages you find online in a neat list. It also saves this list in a stripped-down, easy to read text and picture version on your mobile device. Useful if you don't have a fast data connection.

Pocket works by giving you an extension or bookmarklet — a button that, when clicked, saves the page you're on into Pocket. This page is then converted into an easy to read format and downloaded to your mobile device.

With a service like Pocket, you can always have something ready to read. You won't have to search the Web for something good to read in your down time. You already have your list.

What are some of your favorite tech tips and shortcuts? Let us know on the comment board.


Taylor Wilson is an IT professional at a small Utah company. He has a passion for helping people with technology. Email: taylorwilson@testonetwo.com Online: www.testonetwo.com or twitter.com/twil6

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