If This Then That: Internet’s best productivity tool

Anushka Bhartiya thought of using her laptop for a change to download some songs. When she logged in, she was aghast to find that an unknown hand was already at it, accessing the desktop and other apps. It was her husband, accessing her laptop remotely from his office, about 15 km away.

Bagful of tricks like these is always on the tips of nerds. A not so tech-savvy person might be in awe of it and think it would require ages of knowledge, but wait for a little. The secret here is a technology--If This Then That (IFTTT)--which you can master in minutes. It's a free service that makes apps and devices sync and performs in conjugation. It stitches together over 300 apps that usually wouldn't work together, such as Apple photos and Dropbox, or Gmail and Evernote.

The world is full of productivity tools, but the genius of IFTTT is its simplicity. It connects just two specific services at a time. You only need to imagine what’s possible when one thing can interact with another thing. These are called recipes, and they’re easy to make in a few taps on the IFTTT website or app.

The service, which you can download from the ifttt.com/recipes, has been around since 2010 and is used by more than 1.2 million people every day. It can be used to turn off lights at home remotely, or connect your car stereo automatically to other devices, and can also be used to instantly notify your loved ones when you leave a particular location. IFTTT has an avid community of over 432,000 users who share such inter-app recipes online