Travel Receipt Workflow

Here is a handy workflow to keep track of your reimbursable / billable expenses on the road.Set-up:

• Evernote Premium
• Evernote Scannable
• If This Then That

I have an Evernote Notebook that is used solely for professional receipts. This notebook is named “Receipts_Work”. I’ve set up an If This Then That (IFTTT) Applet to send an email when the notebook receives a new note.When I receive a receipt on the road, I immediately scan it with Scannable then save it to my Receipts_Work Notebook. IFTTT monitors the Receipts_Work Notebook. When the new note is detected, it automatically sends an email to both my assistant and my Omnifocus Maildrop address (so the item is added to my Omnifocus Inbox).After my trip, I can go back to my Evernote, select all the receipts/notes from my trip and make a “Table of Contents” using a single button push in Evernote.This workflow simplifies management of reimbursement receipts. Hope it works as well for you as it does for me.

Using Instapaper and IFTTT to automate capture of highlights

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I'm a big fan of the read it later service, Instapaper. Instapaper stores article to be read at your convenience on any device. If you subscribe to the premium service you get a bunch of perks.Two of the great premium features of Instapaper are 1.highlighting and annotation of articles and 2. The ability to save entire articles and annotations directly to [Evernote]. By hitting ‘like’ in Instapaper, the app automatically saves the full text article to Evernote.For my purposes I save liked articles to Evernote , but rely on IFTTT to handle my Instapaper notes. Each time I highlight or annotate within Instapaper, a text file with the annotated text is saved to Dropbox by this script. The saved note looks like this....Once the text note is in Dropbox, using the same Literature Devonthink Database I use for writing (as I wrote about in this entry), I index the folder that contains all the extracted highlight text files. Thus when I search in Devonthink, I find literature from saved web articles, scholarly manuscripts, and extracted highlights all in a single pass. Using the “See Also" magic hat in Devonthink I can find other relevant information very quickly.A few things I need to work on:1. Automating save to Dropbox of Instapaper comments.2. Automating full text transfer to DropBox from Evernote (for notes with highlights)I hope you find this useful.

If This Then That

I am a big fan of the If This Then That (IFTTT) website and app. If you're not familiar with the site, it is a service that performs an action in response to a trigger. There are dozens of "Channels" that follow you unobtrusively, automating your work.One of the many ways I use IFTTT is to track the time of my commute to and from Duke. The script, using Location Services on my phone, triggers when I enter or leave my driveway. Another script fires when I enter or leave the parking garage at work. When the "If" is triggered, the service appends the date and time to an Evernote file. A separate trigger writes the same information to the Google Calendar I use for time tracking.In the future I will write about how I use IFTTT to help me keep on top of my reading, both for pleasure and for work.