Work-from-home hack: The calendar-connected ‘busy light’

3. Zapier will prompt you to choose which calendar within your account you want to use, if you have multiple calendars configured. Pick whichever one will be most relevant to this purpose (or just pick the default calendar, if you only have one).

4. Next, you’ll see a field asking how long before an event the process should be triggered. You’ll need to leave that set as the default “15” with a free Zapier account, as technically, the service only checks in on your Zaps once every 15 minutes. That being said, it’s always ended up starting the process at exactly the right time for me, so go figure.

5. Perhaps the most important step of all is the “Search Term” field. There, you’ll want to enter whatever word you want to act as the triggering variable within your events — so that an event in your calendar will activate the light only if that word is present in its title. You could use something obvious that’ll come up contextually, like “meeting,” or you could set up a specific code word that you can then add into events when you want the light to be activated.

Once you’ve got all that filled out, Zapier will prompt you to test the connection — and that’s it for this first part of the process. Next, you’ll just need to follow the service’s steps to connect and configure your Hue account. Just note that it’ll require you to select an entire room to activate instead of an individual light, so you may need to set up a special room for this purpose within the Hue Android app with whatever light (or lights) you want included.

JR

All that’s left after that is to click the button at the bottom of the screen to turn your Zap on — and then wait for your first associated event to begin.

JR

If you want to take your smart home-office automation up one more notch from there, you can complete the circle and create a second Zap that’ll turn your light off when any relevant event is scheduled to end. Just open up this page, select “Event Ended” as the trigger, select “Turns lights off” as the action, and then fill in the rest of the fields and activate the Zap.

And with that, my fellow home-worker, you can officially say so long to the Perfectly Timed Interruption — and say hello to some automated awesomeness that’ll bring a little more focus into your life.

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[Android Intelligence videos at Computerworld]