I recently started using The Secret Weapon (TSW) – a productivity approach which combines GTD and Evernote – and I love it. I’ve used every thinkable task management system, Things, Wundertask, any.do, Remember the Milk, OmniFocus, Reminders, etc. but I’ve never really felt comfortable with using any of them for an extended period of time. So far, TSW seems to be breaking this spell, it’s easy to use and organize, and it allows me to collect all kinds of todos – e.g. containing photos or audio – easily in the same place.
Since I started using this approach, I have changed my daily workflow to make my task management more efficient, mainly by using IFTTT recipes, and this post will explain how I am doing this in detail so you might benefit from it as well! Before we start I would suggest you set your Pending Actions notebook as the default notebook in Evernote, this makes it much easier to create IFTTT recipes that don’t need to be changed if you ever change the name of the notebook.
Turning e-mails into todos
When I receive e-mails that I want to turn into TSW actions, I used to add these to Evernote by forwarding them to my Evernote e-mail address. However, this was tiresome and annoying, so using IFTTT I found a better way. I use the Gmail web interface and the Mailbox app on my iPhone for managing e-mail, and both have good support for using labels, so I created a label called Todo under the ‘[Mailbox]’ label and created an IFTTT recipe which added any e-mails with this label to my Pending Actions notebook in Evernote. Easy.
Siri and iOS Reminders
Since I bike from and to work I use Siri extensively, mainly to add todos. Since there is no public Siri API, I can’t use it to directly add Evernote notes, but once again IFTTT comes to the rescue with the recent addition of the iOS Reminders channel. Since you can add iOS reminders using Siri, I just needed a recipe which adds iOS reminders to Evernote. If you only want some reminders to be added to Evernote, you can create, say, a list called “Evernote” and tell Siri: “Add Evernote reminder, remember the milk”. This approach also means you need a new recipe that only adds reminders from a specific Reminders list.
Organizing Todos
For a brief period I used any.do for my task management, and there was one thing in particular I liked about it: Any.do Moment, a scheduled notification asking you to organize your upcoming todos. You see, one of my issues with using task management software is that I forget about them, I don’t check them regularly, I have to force this for it to become a habit, and Any.do Moment was a perfect solution for this. So I took to IFTTT once again and solved this by setting a reminder each weekday which fires a Pushover notification. The recipe can be downloaded here.