SMS and Evernote For Capturing On The Run

If you do a little digging you’ll find no shortage of apps you can use on your smartphone to capture ideas, in fact I mentioned a few myself in this post a while back.

But, what if you don’t have a smartphone? What if you’re trying to conserve your data plan? What if you just don’t want to take the time to open the app for fear you’ll get dragged away by the call of the Siren never to return?

You can turn to the tried and true, nearly always available tool, SMS.

You’ll need to do a bit of setup for this to work but it’s pretty quick and easy.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• An If This Than That account (ifttt.com)
• An Evernote account (evernote.com)
• A phone that can send text messages

I should note that while my prefered tool of choice is Evernote you could set this up to write to a text file in your dropbox account (dropbox.com) or a document in your Google Drive (drive.google.com). The directions that follow will assume Evernote but you can substitute as needed.

1. Sign up or log into your IFTTT account
2. Click on the Channels link at the top of the screen then then on the Evernote icon. Click on the activate button and finish the authentication step.
3. After setting up Evernote, click on the SMS icon on the Channels screen and complete the steps needed to authenticate your phone.
4. Click on the Create link at the top of the page – here’s where we build the recipe to send the messages to our Evernote account
5. Click the ‘this’ link to select the trigger channel
6. Select your SMS Channel
7. Select your trigger – You can decide to send your SMS messages tagged or not. I chose to tag mine so I can use the SMS trigger for other items if I want otherwise everything goes to Evernote.
8. Enter the tag you want to use (if you chose to tag) – I used rpg
9. Click ‘that’ – here we setup what we want done by the system when it gets our SMS
10. Click Evernote
11. Click ‘Append to note’ – I like to keep all my ideas together for processing later but you could have it create a new note for each SMS
12. Feel free to change the action field defaults – I removed the tags and changed the notebook where I wanted the note to live in my account
13. Click the Create Action button at the bottom when you’re done
14. Fill in a description if you want
15. Click the Create Recipe button when you’re set

At this point sending a text message from your phone appropriately tagged to the IFTTT number will generate something like this in your Evernote account.

If you want you could actually use different tags for different ideas. Maybe rpg-ideas for general ideas, rpg-set for setting ideas, rpg-plot for plot ideas, the list is endless. You just need to create a different recipe for each so they end up in the right place.

Set it up, play with it and share any ideas you come up with in the notes below.

May your dice roll well.