You know that I’m a fan of automations. and the House acting alone. Always I’m looking to automate everything I can. so that, for example, the lights don’t turn on every day at 19: 00, not even every day at sunset, but if there’s someone at home or we’re in the area and the house is too dark, let the lights turn on… whatever time it is, so if it suddenly goes down a lot because a storm is going to fall, because the lights are going to turn on. This touched my little children’s noses a lot because they couldn’t play the darkness, so I created an environment that is called ‘Play the darkness’ that
when active it does not take into account the lux at home. Yes, you see the nonsense that is done for the children.
When I say I’m a fan of automations I don’t mean just the house automations. Of course. I like to fight as long as it takes all the worthless manual work that I can replace with an automation on my devices. When I told you years ago about the NFC stickers to run environments or automations at home, I also gave you the example of the infotainment of my car, the browser, that when the mobile was connected to Bluetooth and put a certain playlist in random order, the first song was always the same. then the random order worked, but the first song was always the same… which made me hate it and
I ended up removing that first song from the playlist and so I started to hate another. So I put an NFC sticker in the place where I left the cell phone when I got into the car and that sticker ran an Apple shortcut that played the playlist by Bluetooth randomly… and surprisingly that’s how it worked.
I also have shortcuts and automations in other areas of my life.: the Apple Watch sphere is changed alone according to the Concentration Mode you have, so during the weekends I have no complications like the calendar with the next meeting or the time of the next alarm. Some geolocation automations, such as the one that ignites a SIM card plug that gives way to the router of my apartment when I enter the Valencia Community or the church arch that I have mounted on the Apple Watch to get the workouts up to a lot of different social networks so that we measure who has it longer.
But Today I wanted to talk to you about some automations I have in my workflows. and others I’m working on. I don’t know if you listen to Joan Boluda of Online Marketing but the guy has a thousand things automated through Zapier. In one of his courses he tells how to take an IA blog that will look in the morning for the most relevant and updated articles of a theme, generate an extract and develop it in a WordPress, be published… and then released to all social networks. Without a click, all automatically. Obviously the article made by IA is not of much value, I never use it in the articles of the blog or in the podca
sts, but as proof of concept is interesting. Joaquín Rios, from the La Garaje de Cupertino podcast, also now publishes another podcast automated with his own voice… yes, it’s his voice but it doesn’t have the feelings and passion that we sometimes demonstrate with the voice, it’s not the same thing to say ‘I’ve done an automation for…’ than to say ‘Well good good, you’re not gonna believe the move I’ve made’. We listeners don’t get the same way… but listen, that 5-minute Joaquin podcast gives you brushes on a subject and using Joaquin’s voice, it’s still closer than an automated neutral voice.
The thing is, these days I’ve come across a pretty specific need I wanted to tell you today. You know I work at Cybersecurity at GMV, a technology consultant, which makes me work for projects. It is not the typical repetitive work every day, as soon as I am working on a space-related project as in Autonomous Driving or, as at the moment, on coordinating the alerts of cyber attacks received by a financial entity. I like this approach because it allows me to get to know many sectors and interesting people, but above all because it allows me not to get into something concrete, which you know I’m multi-potential as it says.
Pau Ninja… a restless ass.
Total, that this financial institution has a rather frantic activity with several meetings a day and activities with maturity date, so I spend the day trying to adjust all these tasks in the Office 365 calendar. But also, the company I work for also has its own coordination meetings, the typical partner who asks you something about a past project, a new proposal that we are going to launch to a client and we have to make the proposal… To this we have to add the hours of my chorropotohundreds children, that if out of school, that if my princess has tomorrow math examination and we have to go over the divisions with two figures, that if the ma
yor has a paddle league match 50 kilometers from Madrid and we have to take him… and of course, the Home Consulting I do with some of you, the articles I write for the blog Internet Seguro de Vodafone and the lessons I sometimes give on cybersecurity in the Politécnica de Valencia. As you can imagine, my calendar made smoke and is the application I have more time open on both the computer and the mobile.
What about it? Well, sometimes they sent me a call for a project meeting to the bank’s Office 365 calendar, and it turns out that I just had another internal GMV meeting. Or I was with some of you for a home consulting and just that afternoon I had to take one of my kids to some out-of-school. As each calendar only shows the meetings of that calendar, I had to review them all before I accepted a meeting or sarao, so for a while I replicated the events in all the calendars so that the eggs I had occupied would actually come out as occupied.
And then there are the tasks. The work of each meeting is often derived from work. Other times I’m running in the morning and I remember something in particular I want to do, a fantastic idea for the podcast, a document I want to send that day, the transfer that the school has asked us for the excursion of one of my children… and at that moment, what I do is I tell Siri to remind me at a specific hour or when I get to the office or something like that. On the other hand, the bank’s tasks are put in a Planner of those Office 365 and so I can assign them to the different partners, others I do… but in GMV the same thing happens, we also have a Planner with tasks. And then all
the things you’re asked for by Teams or by email, of course.
Total, as you can imagine, I don’t have a unique INBOX where all the tasks will fall as recommended by all the productivity methodologies, but I have a lot of them… and in some cases I can’t even see them at once, for example to enter Planner with the two Office accounts, you have to do login and login or open a window of incognito of those in the browser and have the two browsers one for each session.
The thing is, these days I’ve been talking to Emilcar, that if you hear it you know it’s a black belt in productivity and it confirmed to me what you’ve already seen, that this is a kid who’s nowhere to take it and that’s how I lose the focus of the tasks and I don’t see the really important ones, I’m putting out fires as the expiration date is coming up or someone asks for something urgently. Without a unified INBOX where you see everything, I cannot prioritize and have control over everything that needs to be done, just as without a unified calendar I cannot accept meetings joyfully because I may be falling into double booking and then have to move some of them or connect to the most important
And the two of us… a mess.
And as a cake glove, I’m an Apple fan. It already bothers me to have to use the Microsoft suite on my day-to-day when until a few months ago, my productivity was based on Apple Notes for meeting notes, scripts, articles, etc., and Reminders for the tasks themselves, some with maturity dates and others just dropped there to keep them in mind… but all in the same app and in sight. In fact, I created a shortcut that was running before the meeting and I created a not- template that was named after the meeting, then a part of the attendees with all the convoked to the meeting and then the
Slowly for the meeting notes… all that automatically too, of course. But now it’s my turn to be Planner and OneNote to work collaboratively with the team.
And for the record that I have nothing against the Office 365 suite, I recognize that it’s going very well and that the possibility of working several people at once on the same document, record, etc. It’s great to then not have to be sharing notes by email, documents with exchange control, etc…. but I like to have it all more or less integrated into the same site, I’m not one of those who use iCloud for the email, the files in Dropbox, the photos in Amazon, the notes in Onenote… that ‘plurality’ of services makes me anxiety, it must be a psychological tart, what to do.
Because my working environment is based on this same suite, I decided to waste some time looking at the possibilities of Power Automate, the service to integrate office functions and automate flows. The truth is that Power Automate is a whole world to make Microsoft apps understand each other, you can do very crazy things, in fact I have decided to invest a few hours of my free time here because I think it has a lot more possibilities than you see in plain sight. You can do things like that every document you put in this folder called ‘Approval Earrings’, send an automatic email to the person responsible for approving them and in the same email comes the
The approval button or not, you can review the document… and when you approve it, you automatically copy it into another folder that puts’ Approved ‘. Everything automatically without you having to click.
In the end ‘the ratito’ was 4 hours and I created a lot of flows that help me in my day to day, I tell you some of them: For example, a specific automated mail that comes from the bank and that when it comes you have to create a task to review that alert, because I have created a Power Automate flow that detects that particular mail from my Input Tray, takes the date, the attached files and the affected asset and creates a task in Planner that assigns the team with that data, adding 4 hours to the date of dispatch and puts it as a date of maturity and notifies us by Teams. All without a click. I also created another flow that connects to my Gmail calendar and how
There’s a new event. I copy it in the Office 365 calendar. This particular one has given me some problem for the time zone, the usual nightmare of the programmers, as Gmail handles the hours in UTC although to us it teaches them adapted to our time zone… but when you catch the event, the original time of the event is in UTC, so I have had to take that time and add a function that adds the UTC + 1 that we have here before incorporating the event into the calendar. That makes me have to change it when the time changes, I’ve pointed it out as a Reminder (shit, I’ve already used Reminders again when the idea was not to! We have to give it to him.
another round). The point is, I’ll have to change it in summer, and I’ll give it one more turn to see if I can fix it in any way. However, I created another to copy the events from the Bank’s Office 365 calendar to the GMV Office 365 and that one has worked smoothly and the first one has been very simple.
Total, which has given me to go a little deeper into Power Automate… and I am very much into it, I come up with so many ideas that I am pointing at them (in an OneNote, yes, I have sold my soul to the devil at this time of my life) and I am pointing them out so that I will not forget. With Power Automate I forget to move files between folders, that’s all. No synchronization, no milk, it does all Power Automate and then it sends me a message to the Teams group concerned. The good thing is that you don’t need to be logged, during the weekend you will continue to work everything the same, holiday, etc, so I can automate some documents and reporting shipments so that
they keep sending even if I’m not here. Shut up, can you imagine what’s wrong with me and I’m dying? It would be a little creepy but the reports would still be sent as in Post Data I love you. It’s a bad thing, it’s a good thing I don’t plan to die soon.
One of the reports I do is to take rows from an Excel and copy them to another consolidated Excel and then update data to update the graphs. Well also automated, now I want to fight for those graphics to be copied to a PowerPoint automatically, see if I give with the key. There is clearly a manual review and evaluation, one thing is that the graph is updated and another that is sent directly to the customer. To me I like to add a small text analyzing the graph, the most relevant event that week and that we still can’t do with IA… yes analyze the graph and detect trends with respect to last week, but not that goes
prayer that gives you the context of the project and meet the client, of course. The fact is that the automations and the IA are not going to take away all the work like when Homer gets the chick that always swings and presses the Y key from the YES, but so I can use my time on much more productive things that bring real value and stop doing basic administrative tasks.
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