If you’ve already given yourself over to google android or apple iPhone location services, your phone will be tracking your moves.
With Google, you can view a personal report of your movements over a custom time range. When I was travelling more it was interesting to look over the countries I visited and where I had been.
Quite good for remembering the location of that nice restaurant or that interesting landmark you saw. Especially helpful to find your hotel if you need it.
One of the coolest phone combinations with IFTTT is the ability to log your entry and exit to a set geographical location.
There are a lot of applications for this. Both for personal and professional use.
How to automatically log entry and exit to a location (geolocation)
This is possible via an applet on IFTTT. If you don’t have an account on IFTTT it’s easy to sign up for. Visit https://ifttt.com/
An applet is essentially a small program that says ‘If this happens, then do this’.
In this case, we are saying ‘If I enter this geographical area (you get to choose where on a google map), then log the time and date in a spreadsheet.’
It lets you see when you arrived and left the office, or home, or anywhere else for that matter.
There are a few options for logging. You can auto log to google sheets using this applet:
Or you can auto log to an Excel spreadsheet using this applet:
https://ifttt.com/applets/103750819d
When you enable the IFTTT applet it will let you choose your location, which you can get quite granular on. Mine was set to a 1 block radius, and I had it IFTTT alert me when it triggered.
Logging geolocation for personal use
For my personal use, this first came in handy as a remote worker.
I wanted to record how often I went into the shared workspace I was working from and long I spent there. It wasn’t that the company I was working for was expecting a report but as a remote worker it’s quite common to feel responsible for your time.
It might be that you just love data and want to track when you leave home in the morning and return at night.
You could also log how often you actually go to your gym by logging the times you arrive and leave. With some basic formulas in google or excel you can see if that money you’re paying is actually worth it.
Logging geolocation for business use
For business use, you may have a work phone or staff with work phones.
With permission or contractual agreement, you may choose to log when they enter or leave a location.
For couriers, you might want to show customers how often you deliver to their place of work to help with contract negotiations in the future.
You might need information on how often your staff – e.g. plumbers, electricians enter and leave a work site to help justify project overruns due to clients need to alter a project and cause costs to increase.
A casual employee might use it to record their part-time hours at a job, using the entry and exit times that are logged to confirm their timesheet.
So many option and so many ways to make this work for you. I hope this was helpful for you.
Endless hours of experimentation, professional work, and personal investment in Home Theatre, Hi-Fi, Smart Home Automation and Headphones have come to this.
Former owner of Headphones Canada, a high-end headphone specialty retailer.