EasilyDo (for iPhone)

• Pros

  Personal assistant app that automates everyday tasks. Saves time, effort, and hassles. Helps remind you to complete some online tasks, like sending birthday and sympathy notes. Free. A stellar helper.

• Cons For iPhone only. Not all automated tasks tell user fully what they do and how.
• Bottom Line

  The free iPhone app EasilyDo works as a personal assistant and automation machine, taking care of a variety of tasks, like adding new contacts to your address book, tracking packages, and monitoring some of your social networks for important news.

By Jill Duffy

Productivity enthusiasts are always looking to shave a few seconds here, a few seconds there, from their workload, knowing that over time, seconds add up to minutes and hours and days of your life that could be better spent. The iPhone-only app EasilyDo (free) promises to save these precious seconds and minutes for you by automating simple tasks?and by golly, it does. EasilyDo's capabilities span all areas of life, from saving new contact's information right into your Contacts app with the touch of a button to letting you schedule a "happy birthday" post to appear on a friend's Facebook timeline.

A similar (yet slightly different) app in terms of functionality and automation is Tempo Smart Calendar (free), although it homes in on appointments and their participants, rather than the whole expanse of your digitally connected life. EasilyDo just has much more to offer.

Setting Up and Using EasilyDo
For EasilyDo to work, you need to connect it to a variety of other services, such as your email and calendars. Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Exchange, and IMAP email accounts are all supported, as is connectivity to Evernote, iCloud, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. After you authenticate as many connections as you want to have, EasilyDo will get to work?although there are more settings you can configure to further tailor what kind of notifications EasilyDo will provide (I'll provide a few examples further below).

The app's opening page shows new notifications and suggested actions, which could be anything from "Add Lulu Esperanza to Contacts" to a brief weather report update. Tap on any entry, and EasilyDo either completes the action immediately, or gives you a little more information if it needs you to make another decision first, such as asking how you'd like to phrase your "happy birthday" Facebook post and whether you want to include a gift. If a notification isn't relevant, you can swipe across it to delete it.

The settings let you configure the notifications you get from EasilyDo, and they're expansive. This app had more ways to save me time than I could have imagined. You can "show support" when someone on Facebook posts bad news. You can track shipments when a package ID comes into your email account. You can merge duplicate contacts, automatically dial into conference calls, and even set the app to snag Apple's free app of the week. Really, though, the options go on and on, and they're amazingly useful. One of my favorites is the ability to send a text when I leave a specific place?to a specific person and with a time indicator, too (e.g., only send the message if it's after 6:30 p.m., meaning I'm running late). There are ways to interact with scheduled events, restaurant reservations, boarding passes, and more, all of which save you time and help you tick off things you've been meaning to do, if only they didn't take five minutes?because now they don't.

I needed a few days with the app before getting comfortable with exactly how much automation it handles. For example, when I tapped to send a message of support via Facebook to someone whose relative had recently passed away, EasilyDo did not let me preview the message or customize it. My heart quickened as I raced onto Facebook through the full website to see what and where and how had I posted my "support." Luckily, the message was a vague and benign "I'm so sorry to hear this." comment to my friend's original post, but it would have been much better to have known ahead of time exactly what would be said. That's not what happened when I posted a "happy birthday" message to a different friend. There, EasilyDo let me customize the message, decide whether I wanted to add a gift, and then when the post went live, it showed up as being posted from EasilyDo (not the case with my sympathy note). See the slideshow to view the birthday post.

Easily Done
The free and stellar app, EasilyDo, automates a wide variety of simple tasks that add up to save you dramatic amounts of time and effort. It should go straight to your list of recommended iPhone apps. Install EasilyDo, customize it as you need, and let it save you time, effort, and a lot of hassle to taking care of everyday tasks.?

By Jill Duffy Analyst, Software

Jill Duffy is an analyst in the software, Internet, and networking team, specializing in productivity software, iOS, and apps and gadgets for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on...

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