So last week’s column on geek-outery to the highest was met with some “yes, and…” action like I hoped. Here are two of my favorite shares from awesome readers *and* a round-up of a few more links to help take your productivity to the next tier.

First, a share from Derek Houck, posted at our SMFA Ninjas Facebook group.

Wanted to piggy-back on Bonnie Gillespie’s latest Actors Voice column. One of the articles she links to talks about setting up an IFTTT recipe that takes tweets from specific users and puts them into a spreadsheet.

That’s all well and good, but I live much more in Gmail than in Google Drive, and I want an email digest. So, I’ve created a recipe that does just that: https://ifttt.com/recipes/286834-twitter-daily-digest.

If you’d like to start receiving all of a user’s tweets in an email digest yourself, just add the recipe to your IFTTT, making sure to change the Twitter username to the profile you wish to add to the digest.

Derek Houck

Love it! Thank you, Derek. Haven’t started using IFTTT myself (oh man, the can of worms I worry it will become for me) but this looks really powerful and I thank you for sharing your recipe!

Next up, Christine Tarbet shared this bit of gold in our SMFA Talkback forums. This is great for folks who’ve been given the go-ahead to reach out via email but never got around to getting the exact email address for the recipient.

If you have Gmail, there is an add-on in Chrome called Rapportive. It shows you LinkedIn profiles in the right pane when you put in an email address. The ninja part? You can guess someone’s personal email address if it is not published.

For instance, if you know that the email address domain is @whatevertalentagency.com, you can use guesswork to figure out the first part of the email address. Say, for instance, the agent’s name is Mary Smith, you’ll want to try mary@whatevertalentagency.com or mary.smith@whatevertalentagency.com (those are the two most common email types).

When you actually hit upon a real email address, the LinkedIn profile will pop up.

Love that! I killed off my LinkedIn profile three years ago when they had that huge security breach exposing millions of users’ private data (plus, all I was ever asked to do was write recommendations for actors I had never cast — a mind-numbingly ridiculous cycle of nonsense), but as David Harper once shared here, there are smart ways for creatives to use LinkedIn. Thanks, Christine, to adding to the ninjosity!

Finally, here are some links I wanted to share last week, but MAN was that column getting long! So, here we go: more geeky shares for using Gmail filters like a pro, for taking Google Alerts to a whole new level with Mention, for linking your systems with Zapier, for ending the bookmarking habit when you know you want to read something later using [ToRead.cc] (this is great for convos on message board or things that will eventually go behind paywalls), and the gamechanger for a few of my old inboxes: the Unroll Me service.

Ahh… as I head off email altogether in 2015, weaning slowly has been a great start. And in case you’re curious, severely limiting email use has been one of the most amazing boosts to my productivity EVER. It’s insane how much I’m getting done!

Bonnie Gillespie autographed the internet


Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!


Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001974.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.

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