I‘ve promised to try to provide one advanced automation tip each month, and it’s that time again. Fortunately, this month’s automation tip is practical, and requires no programming whatsoever.
What problem I am trying to solve
Although I’m pretty good at capturing a lot of information, the one area that I have been particularly poor in is in tracking mileage driven for business purposes. Usually, I just plain forget to do it. As my freelance and speaking work increases, however, I need to be capturing this more for tax purposes. But I also hate doing anything manually that can otherwise be automated. So, how to solve this problem?
Back in December, I bought an Automatic Link from Automatic. The Automatic Link is like FitBit for your car. You plug it into your car’s data port (the same port that a mechanic uses to figure out what’s wrong with your car) and it sync’s to your mobile device and gives you all kinds of information about your driving. If you like data, it’s a pretty cool little device. It can also tell you what’s wrong with your car when the Check Engine light comes on. And it remembers where you parked, so you don’t have to.
Recently, Automatic integrated with IFTTT to provide a bunch triggers upon which automation workflow could be captured. Initially, I created an IFTTT recipe that automatically captures information about each trip in a Google Spreadsheet. It then occurred to me that I could do something similar, automatically capturing trip information in Evernote, which in turn would allow me to automatically track my business trips, tag them, and have them readily accessible for my accountant come tax time.
Ingredients for this automation
- An Automatic Link device.
- An Evernote account.
- A car
My IFTTT recipes to automate collection of driving data
I have created two IFTTT recipes for my Automatic Link. The first recipe just grabs the data after each trips and sends it to a Google Spreadsheet so that I have all of the raw data in one place. Here is that recipe:
For the purposes of collecting mileage for business related trips, I created an IFTTT recipe that sends trip information to a new note in Evernote. The note is created within 15 minutes of the completion of a trip, and it contains a ton of information including the mileage, maps of the start and end points, start time, end time, fuel consumed, and much more. These notes go into my Inbox notebook so I can review them each day. They are tagged “mileage” so that there are easy to find and collect together. Here is the shared recipe in IFTTT:
Integrating this into my daily review
Each evening, usually after I finish my writing for the day, I pull up a saved search for my “daily review” which allows me to look at all of my Evernote activity for the day. It gives me an opportunity to review my day and also tag or file any notes that have not yet been categorized.
One step I’ve added to this review is to look for trip notes created from my Automatic Link and IFTTT. It is easy to spot these with my daily review by searching for the tag “mileage” but usually I don’t even have to do that. I rarely have more than a dozen new notes on any given day. In my daily review, I am looking for those trips that are business trips. When I find them, I add a “taxes” tag to the note so that they will be part of my tax search come tax time. I can also add more information to the note, like the purpose of the trip, just by appending to what is already there.