While Zapier is usually associated with businesses and project management, you can actually use the platform to automate certain personal tasks in your daily life. This is thanks to the thousands of apps that Zapier can integrate with, allowing you to integrate your productivity apps together — as well as creating automations between your personal apps.

I explored the platform to see how I could apply it to my daily life and found a variety of ways you can use Zapier to automate personal tasks.

5 Save email attachments to Google Drive

An easy way to back up attachments

Zapier lets you send emails with attachments that get automatically uploaded to your Google Drive. This is useful if you want to save receipts or proof of payment to your Google Drive without having to download the email attachment separately. I decided to set up this automation to store all my receipts and invoices in a single place.

To use the automation, you can use a Zapier template. The first step is setting up the trigger with ZapierMail, which will generate a custom email address that you can use. When you send an email to this address, Zapier is able to fetch its data and the inbound mail acts as the trigger. For your test, make sure you use an email with an attachment.

The action for this automation is uploading the document to Google Drive. For this second step, you will need to connect your Google Drive account to Zapier and select a folder for your attachment files. Once you publish the Zap, any email attachment you send to the custom email address should be uploaded to your Google Drive folder.

There are also a variety of Windows automation tools you can use to set up this specific feature.

4 Send weather forecasts

Get weather updates messaged to you

Zapier has a built-in weather forecast tool that you can use to get daily weather updates. To use it, you will need to add your location's latitude and longitude so that the tool knows what data to pull. You can also set whether you want it to report this data in degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit.

You can set up this Zap with a variety of messaging apps like Slack. For my own automation, I chose Discord. This means I can get a daily message from the Zapier bot that includes the weather forecast details I want.

Even if you want the app to DM you the weather update on Discord, you will still need to add it to a server where you have Manage Server permissions. So I created my own server that I can later customize with other bots and tools.

3 Send new YouTube videos to a messaging app

A useful way to keep up with your favorite creator

It can be difficult to keep up with your favorite creators, depending on how many people you subscribe to on YouTube. However, with Zapier, you can get videos from a specific creator sent to a channel in Slack or Discord.

You will need to link your YouTube account, even if you're not using your own YouTube channel. When setting up the YouTube channel to pull from, you will need to use the channel ID. You can get this number by going to the YouTube profile, selecting more in the bio, then selecting Share channel and Copy channel ID.

Within Zapier, you can set a name for the bot and what the message text will include (such as the channel name and video URL). Thanks to Zapier, I now get a channel message whenever Ze Frank posts another funny animal video.

2 Back up your Spotify playlists

This works best for new playlists

There are so many songs I've enjoyed that I've lost over the years because I changed my music streaming service. That's why, when I saw that Zapier could integrate with Spotify, I figured it could be a great way to back up my Liked songs.

I did this by creating a trigger with Spotify and an action with Google Docs. The trigger is a New Saved Track, while the action is Append Text to Document. I linked the action with a Google Doc I had created called Spotify favorites. For the text to add to my Google Doc, I select fields such as Track Name, Artist's Name, and External URLs Spotify.

The drawback of this method is that it doesn't export all of the songs currently on your Liked playlist. Removing and adding the songs again does not always work, either. However, any new songs you add to the playlist will be added to your document. You can also set up this automation for other custom playlists that you create.

1 Sync your to-do list with Google Calendar

Works with a variety of apps

One of the most useful personal automations I created with Zapier is syncing my TickTick tasks with Google Calendar. To do this, I set up an automation that creates a detailed event in Google Calendar whenever a new task is added to my TickTick inbox.

Since Zapier works with a variety of to-do list apps like Microsoft To Do, Any.do Personal, Remember The Milk, Google Tasks, and many others; you can set up your own automation to use your own task apps. You can also use a Google Calendar alternative as long as Zapier supports it.

Use Zapier to save you time

While Zapier is marketed towards businesses and professionals, its integration with thousands of apps means that you can set up a variety of personal automations to save you time in your daily life. I've just touched on a few of the ways you can use Zapier to automate your personal tasks, so feel free to explore the platform and see how you can incorporate it into your daily life.