I love having everything in my life automated so that I can spend time doing the things I enjoy. I am just getting my new house set up and I can’t wait to automate everything with Vivint and IFTTT. While Vivint offers a ton of home automation services for the whole home, IFTTT lets me automate almost every app on my phone.

If you aren’t familiar with IFTTT, it is an app that creates recipes between your favorite services to automate parts of your life. The name stands for “If This, Then That” and here are a few of my favorite recipes that I use all the time.

• If Instagram > Then Flickr. I like to keep my Instagram feed organized and accessible. I use one recipe to post every one of my Instagram photos to my Flickr account, and that way I can sync my Flickr account to my Apple TV, and have my own Instagram feed as my Apple TV screensaver.
• If Instagram > Then Twitter. I was sorely disappointed when Twitter got rid of the ability to view Instagram photos natively in the Twitter stream. Now they make you load the photos externally on the Instagram website. I set up a recipe that posts each one of my Instagram photos as a native Twitter image automatically, so it is always visible in my Twitter stream.
• If Facebook > Then Twitter. One of the most tedious things to do on social media is changing your profile picture to match across networks. There is a recipe that will automatically update your photos on other networks when you change it on one of them.
• If Weather > Then Email. If you hate walking out the door for the day without your umbrella and getting caught in a downpour, there’s a recipe to help you avoid that situation. You can get a notification whenever there is a severe weather alert for your area and never get caught in the rain again!
• If Craigslist > Then Email. When you are hunting for something on Craigslist, you have to be quick on the reply to get the item you are looking for. With IFTTT, you can set up a custom search that will notify you when a new listing appears. This was especially helpful for me this month when I was on the hunt for free moving boxes in my neighborhood.