Never heard of IFTTT? Well, boy oh boy, are you in for a treat today! IFTTT stands for “If This, Then That.” The site provides value by allowing geniuses and regular joes alike to come together and create ‘recipes’ that allow different services (e.g. Fitbit, Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox, and hundreds of others) to connect with each other. You can think of a ‘recipe’ as just another name for an app.

As many of you know, Hotshot Fitness thinks highly of Fitbit products (in particular, the Aria Scale & the Charge HR). However, one of our biggest complaints was that the data it gathers is ephemeral. It vanishes into the ether after a week or two. So unless, you wanted to manually enter your data into a spreadsheet, you were S.O.L. Fortunately, IFTTT provides a way to store that information AUTOMATICALLY. By leveraging Google Drive, you can now store sleep logs, weight logs, and daily activity summaries to a spreadsheet. Now, if you wanted to say, visualize your weight loss efforts across a year, you could easily do that. Or you could run some statistical analysis on your sleeping patterns.

There are literally thousands of recipes, and more are added every day. It’s a great service that can help you not only achieve your fitness goals, but can also help you be more productive at work and home. Below, we have listed links to our favorite recipes.

Note: In order to view the recipes, you might need to sign-up for an account with IFTTT first. 

Six Favorite IFTTT Recipes

1. Track your fitbit sleep logs in Google Drive spreadsheet.
2. Track your fitbit weight logs in Google Drive spreadsheet 
3. Add your daily fitbit summary to a Google Drive spreadsheet
4. Get a reminder notification if you haven’t hit your goals by a certain time
5. Store your Strava Routes in a Day One Journal 
6. Save your Strava Activities in a Google Spreadsheet 

Public Service Announcement:

IFTTT provides quite a few recipes for automatically pushing out goal achievements (daily steps reached, etc.) across a variety of social platforms. Please, I implore you: think deeply about whether or not to activate these. There’s a lot of noise on the internet – will this just be contributing to that noise? Or does it bring information that others can benefit from? If we’re being honest, I believe that I do not need to learn via Twitter that you hit your daily goal. Nor do I believe that anyone else does. Not your mom, your boyfriend, or your weird Aunt Liz from Omaha. So please use those social recipes with care. 

Sincerely, 

Everyone on the internet