Tasks and little bits of information come our way all day long. How can you trap them quickly so you can continue with your work? How can you be assured you’ll remember the revisit them later and take the appropriate action?

In this episode, we cover:

• How I’ve been using voice input to trap the to-dos and bits and information
• The “monkey wrench” that has been thrown into the workflow
• The workaround I am going to be using and think would be helpful for you as well

Important update…

Since the video you just watched was published, I have been working with something even better.

What’s wrong with what you had?

Good question. In the video above, both tasks and bits of information go to one place…the inbox of your digital task list. But…that also means a “to-do” becomes going through the inbox and tagging the informational items with the tag “Journal.” In addition, the date-and-time stamp which shows up in Evernote become the date and time you added the tag, not the date and time you actually entered the information in your system.

The video below shows a new project. It allow me to put information items straight into Evernote into my “Frank’s Journal” note.

Watch and you see how I set it up and how you can do the same.

Seems simple. How come you didn’t think of it before?

Well, actually I did. The problem was I could not get the IFTTT applet to work consistently.

Why was it working great sometimes, yet other times the information wouldn’t show up in Evernote until the next day…if it showed up at all? And the date-and-time stamps represent when the information was added to Evernote. Ideally, the stamp should represent the day and time I composed the text.

So I reached Out to If This Then That

The quick reply read as follows:

Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out.
Could you follow these instructions for enabling a persistent notification for the IFTTT app?
Then head to Settings > Apps and notifications > IFTTT > Advanced > Battery, and select Don’t optimize.
Give that a try and let me know whether you see improved performance from your Applet.

And it worked! But why?

I reached out to IFTTT again to see if I could get an explanation for why the changes I made were now giving me consistent results. Again, I received a quick, yet detailed reply:

Usually issues like this are caused by Doze mode, which kicks in when a device has been inactive for a certain amount of time, and aims to conserve battery by restricting apps’ access to the network and background refreshes. Both of those things are crucial for IFTTT Applets.
 
By changing the Battery setting for the IFTTT app to Don’t optimize, we’re telling the system not to put those same restrictions on the IFTTT app, even if the device enters Doze mode.

Keep in mind the instructions here are for Android. Hey, if you are an iOS user, give this concept a try and let me know how the instructions should be modified for iOS users.

I’m a fan of voice input, and the applet you saw in this latest video gives me something that will work not only with my phone, but also with my watch. If you wind up doing the same thing, let me know.

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