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One thing I did exactly once in school and never again was diagram sentences.

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It never made sense as to why we had to do it to me. And for 99.99% of the population

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after school, we never had to do it again. Heck

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after fourth grade or whatever it was, we never had to do it again.

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And while we never have to think about diagramming sentences,

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that's not really the point, is it? The point is to show that you

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understand the components

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of a sentence and the structure

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of a sentence. So even if

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we don't explicitly diagram sentences

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in our adult life,

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heck, in our high school life or middle school life,

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we still had to go through this crucial activity to grasp

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how to put together a good sentence.

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And I am thinking about this a lot as I teach the components of automation,

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because you can just open up a Zapier canvas or a make canvas or whatever

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and start to put things together.

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But that would be a lot like just throwing a bunch of words together and hoping you

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build a sentence.

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Instead. It's crucial to understand the four components

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of an automation, and that is what we are going to talk about today.

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But before we get into that, I do want to say if you are unsure of the types of automations

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that you can build or

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that you should build, I have a new quiz out that will help you go to streamlined

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fm slash quiz

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and answer four questions based on your answers. I will recommend four automations

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that will help you solve your most crucial problem.

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And even if you don't use the exact tools that I use in these automations, you can

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still see the how and why behind those automations. So again, that is over at streamlined

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fm slash quiz to get personalized recommendations for automations based on your struggles.

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All right. Hey everybody, let's get into it. The four components of automation. So

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the way I'm gonna break this down is I'll give you the two most important, the two

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requirements. We'll take a quick break for our sponsor

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and then I'll give you the two optional, but very helpful.

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And I should say at the beginning here that

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I talk a lot about Zapier,

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but this is really

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any automation. And so I'll give some examples kind of outside of Zapier to help

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you visualize or grasp

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how exactly all of this comes together.

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And then we'll talk through an automation that uses all four of these components.

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And every automation starts with a trigger.

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That's the first component. Number one, a trigger.

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It's some event that kicks off the entire automation.

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An automation can't just happen out of nowhere,

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so you need something to kick the whole thing off. And it doesn't have to be some

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complicated thing.

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Most of the time it's not. It's a single action.

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It could be someone signs up for your mailing list.

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It could be that a file gets uploaded to Google Drive or Dropbox.

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It could be that you push a button on your stream deck,

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or it just could be a time of day 6:00 PM

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All of these things are triggers that could kick off in automation.

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And

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to bring it back to something concrete that you

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likely do yourself

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automatic bill pay,

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the trigger for that

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is day of the month,

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right? So if you have to pay your mortgage and you have automatic bill pay

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on the first day of the month, the day of the month is the trigger.

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So

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that's a really simple one, right? Uh, if you have an email autoresponder,

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the trigger is someone emails you.

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That's the trigger.

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So it has to be some event or

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some thing,

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some occurrence. We'll say

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that kicks off the automation. And that is a requirement.

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Whether or not it's you pushing a button, which is a more manual, but still an automation,

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right? If you think about

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autocorrect or text expansion, right? If you

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type in some short key combination

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and it expands, I do A DDR and it expands to my entire address,

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you typing A DDR is the trigger.

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So it's some

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event that kicks off the entire automation, and that is a requirement.

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Number two is actions.

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So once an automation is triggered, one or more actions are performed. And here you

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can have multiple actions.

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When this one thing, this one trigger happens, do all of this stuff.

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So if we look at our two examples from earlier, automatic bill pay, right? The trigger

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is the day of

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the month,

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the action

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is

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the mortgage holder. The bank, I suppose, uh, the bank

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takes money out of your account.

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So that is the trigger day of the month. The action is

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the institution that has the bill takes money out of your account

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with an email autoresponder, right? The trigger

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is someone emails you,

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the action

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is your email client sends a response letting people know that you're not in the

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office or

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for whatever reason, you only check email once a day. That, I mean, that's like a

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hot take here. I don't,

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I don't think you need to tell people that you only check your email at 3:00 PM I

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think it's fine.

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Uh, so

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th those things are the actions, right?

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Time of day, right? Maybe you want your outside lights to turn on at 6:00 PM right?

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That's a home automation. The trigger is 6:00 PM

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the action

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is your outside lights turn on.

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And one more. The trigger could be someone signs up for your mailing list.

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The action is you send them a PDF

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So that is the action.

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Once an automation is triggered, one or more actions are performed. This is also

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a requirement, right? Because without actions

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have nothing you, you have a trigger that does nothing.

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So triggers and actions are the two requirements for an automation.

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And with that, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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Okay? So we've covered the first two components of an automation. Those are

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the requirements.

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The trigger, which is some event that kicks off the entire automation and the action

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one or more actions that happen once

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an automation is triggered.

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These next two are somewhat optional.

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First, let's talk about the third component, which is the condition.

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You can check for certain conditions to trigger actions as well.

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This is what starts to make automations a little bit more complicated because now

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you're doing some decision making.

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So going back to our earlier examples

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with automatic bill pay,

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maybe the trigger is the date and the action is take money out of the account.

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Maybe a condition is, but only if they have enough to cover the entire bill.

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So maybe the condition is if balance is at least equal to the amount of the bill,

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right?

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This will happen, especially with mortgage holders, right? They're not gonna overdraw

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your account. Or some banks have overdraw protection where your account can't get

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overdrawn.

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So a condition lies there, right?

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With email autoresponder,

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it could be the trigger is someone emails you, the action is you send a response.

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The condition could be only email this person if they're already in my contact book,

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right? Or in my contacts,

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especially if you're on vacation, you don't wanna signal to any random person

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that you're on vacation. They don't need to know that. Who cares, right? So that

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could be the condition.

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And then if we look at our

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time of day,

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right?

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This is an actual automation for my home that I have

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6:00 PM it's actually sunset,

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but 6:00 PM is more concrete than sunset, right? It's

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6:00 PM

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turn my outside lights on,

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but only if it's during the Christmas season, right? Because I have the Christmas

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lights. So

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it's 6:00 PM

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between let's say November 20th

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and January 10th.

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If that's the condition, turn on the Christmas lights.

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So those are the conditions. Really simple decision making here.

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But it makes your automations even more robust

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because now you're not just executing

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on every action. 'cause that will require some management, right? And

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in Zapier, it can get more complicated. Or in make.com, well make@make.com.

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It can get more complicated where you can have these paths, right? Where it's like

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if it's condition A, do this. If it's condition B, do this. If it's condition C,

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do this.

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But for the sake of this

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walkthrough,

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you trigger actions based on a condition.

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And then the fourth component is timing.

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So you can choose how often

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your automations run.

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You can choose to run them immediately

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or at specific intervals. So now let's, we'll kind of get away from

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our other examples because this is a little bit different.

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The timing is essentially polling for

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the automation to happen. It's checking at certain times, right? And, and sure,

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right? Maybe with the automatic bill pay,

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the timing is also the trigger, right? The, the day of the month is the trigger.

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The timing is once a month,

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with an email autoresponder,

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the timing is immediate, right? You want to send that response

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when you get the email. So the timing's immediate for that.

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So those are the four components,

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right? Number one is the trigger. Some event needs to kick off the entire automation.

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Number two is the action or actions.

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Once an automation is triggered, one or more actions are performed.

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Number three is the condition. So you can check for certain conditions to trigger

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actions as well.

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And number four is the timing. You can run

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automations immediately or at specific intervals. One more. I think good example

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for timing for me is that I am subscribed to help a reporter out.

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They email three times a day looking for requests from reporters.

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And I don't wanna have to read through those emails. Sometimes there's a lot of requests

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in there.

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So I have an automation set up once a day. So the timing is once a day at 7:30 PM

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Eastern time

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where it will look for any emails from Harrow for that day,

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and then look for certain search terms.

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And

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if it finds emails that match these criteria, it adds it to a spreadsheet for me

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to review the next morning.

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So that's a really good example of timing. It only happens

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once a day. So

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those are the four components of automation.

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Let's walk through all of them. And I'll have a visual in the show notes for this

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over at streamlined FM or

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in the player where you're listening to this episode.

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But here's an example of an automation where I

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include all four components in one.

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So the automation is

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when a new database item is added to notion

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add the email address

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to two kit,

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but only if they've opted in.

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So I have a feedback form, you can see it over@streamlinedfeedback.com,

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where for a while I was offering a lead magnet for people who submitted feedback.

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And so you'd fill out your name and email address,

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and then there was an opt-in to the email list.

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So when someone fills out the form, that's

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the trigger.

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The condition is if they have opted in to join my mailing list,

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send their information to kit,

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the timing is every two minutes.

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And I chose this timing. Maybe Zapier chose it for me

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because there's no immediate, right? Some

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triggers in Zapier happen immediately.

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The service will go out and tell Zapier, Hey, this thing just happened.

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the case of notion,

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some of these triggers aren't. So Zapier actually has to go out to notion and be

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like, Hey, are there new records? Right? Are there new items in the last two minutes?

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So I could change the timing to every 30 minutes or every 60 minutes, but

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I want near instant gratification here, right? I don't want somebody who signed up

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for my mailing list

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or who opted into my mailing list to have

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to wait

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to get the free opt-in.

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So I chose every two minutes 'cause that's a

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That's a reasonable interval.

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So that's all four components. The trigger is new item added to notion

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the action is add subscriber to form or add subscriber to kit.

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The condition is only if they've opted in.

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And the timing is every two minutes.

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Now, I will include some visuals here so you can see how everything works. I also

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have a video over on my YouTube channel where I walk through all of these

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with the visuals, so you can see it over there too.

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But that's it for this episode.

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We talked about the four components of automation, the two required, and the two

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slightly optional ones.

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If you want to get personalized ideas for how

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you can automate,

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you can head over to streamlined fm slash quiz,

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take the quiz and I will send you four recommended automations based on the thing

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that you are struggling with the most.

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Thanks so much for listening to this episode, and until next time,

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I hope you find some space in your week.