That pair of smart lights in your home, the customizable Flic button on your desk, your voice assistant of choice, and the smart outlet in your office all add up to create a smart home you can use before, during, and after your workday. Instead of just telling Alexa to turn on your bright white lights to boost your productivity, here’s how you can use your internet-connected items to prep your workspace before you start, keep colleagues informed of your status, and keep track of items that require your immediate attention no matter where you are in your home.
Order in lunch, fire up Slack, and plan your afternoon shower. It’s Work From Home Week! From our couches and our local coffeeshops, Lifehacker is bringing you advice on maintaining your productivity, balance, and sanity, whether you’re working at home for just a day or a whole career.
Build a BRB Button
Running out the door to take the dog out for a quick walk? Using a Flic button and IFTTT integration, you can build yourself an away button to keep your colleagues abreast of your availability. You can link your Flic button to your Slack account using IFTTT and send out pre-written responses based on your Flic button presses. Away for five minutes? One click. Going on your lunch break? Double click. You get the idea.
Enable the BRB Button:
Open the Flic app.
Select your Flic button.
Select the + next to your click option.
Select Slack and enter your message details.
Code Red Email Alerts
You might be hanging out in your living room enjoying your lunch when someone at work needs your help urgently. If you’ve got smart lights that display multiple colors, you can build a smart home recipe linked to your email account that will flash your lights if you get an email from whomever you select—whether it’s your boss or best friend.
Enable Code Red Emails
Create a new IFTTT recipe with Gmail.
Choose whom you want to receive email alerts from.
Choose your smart bulb and configure it to blink, brighten, or dim.
Calendar Location Tracker
Working from home often means working from a coffee shop or shared working space. Whether they make your drink as soon as you walk in the door or not, keep track of how long you actually spend at your home away from home.
When you’re done at your location of choice, you can set up another location-aware automation that gets your office ready when you walk in the door using your voice assistant or HomeKit device’s geofencing feature. Have it turn on your space heater and lights to walk into a warm and well-lit office.
Enable Calendar Location Tracker
Enable this IFTTT recipe and link it to your Google Calendar.
Choreograph the End of Your Day
After working all morning and into the day, you might be tempted to use that saved commute time to squeeze out a bit more work a little later into the day. You can get your lights and voice assistant to keep you from transforming into a home-based workaholic by setting up an end-of-day ritual using your voice assistant, smart lights, and music streaming service. You can configure your assistant to respond to your custom voice command (“Hey Google, I’m punching out!” is pretty fun to say), play music from our streaming service of choice, and set your lights to a particular scene or pattern to really get the end of the day started.
Enable Your End of Day Routine
Use this IFTTT recipe to connect your assistant to your smart bulbs with a custom command.
Select your Flic button.
Select the + next to your click option.
Select Spotify and enter your playlist details.