It’s a small thing that I set up years ago, but it can be very useful at times. I’ve been a Foursquare user for years (here’s a post comparing them to others back in 2009) and since 2011 I’ve had a magic little IFTTT “recipe” to help push those check-ins to a private Google Calendar of mine.
Here’s the result. Let’s go back to election day of last year, and I can see exactly what I did:
I checked in at Holy Trinity (our polling place) at 6:49. There was already a huge line. After, at 7:46, I grabbed some Chick-Fil-A on the way into the office. I had a 9:30 meeting (on my normal calendar), then was supposed to go to the Kennesaw Business Association for lunch (probably didn’t, since I never checked in). My wife had a hair appointment that afternoon, then we all went to get family pictures in the afternoon — we arrived exactly five minutes early. Then on the way home we ate at Los Arcos.
I’ll admit — while the ability to do this is kind of neat, it’s rarely useful. Still, it can be very useful at times to be able to determine what you did on a certain day, and it’s automatic so why not? It was also helpful after we spent some time digging through my calendar to find out the “team lunches” information for Ashlea’s 2016 Review blog post.
Foursquare is not nearly as popular as it used to be, and likely never will be again. Still, I enjoy keeping track of these kind of items and simple IFTTT recipes like this can be great!
Do you ever “check-in” anywhere? If so, what app do you use to do it?
