Winter break is just beyond the horizon, and I’m sure many of you are only a few days away from a glorious two-three week vacation. So, what better way to enjoy the break than spending eight more hours a day glued to your smartphone? Hopefully, with the help of this app, you can not only spend less time on your phone and enjoy your time with friends and family but also unlock some pretty sweet features you didn’t your phone could do.

IF by IFTTT is an app that can easily be used to make simple connections between most of your favorite phone applications. IFTTT, an online and smartphone app, stands for “If This Then That”. This happens to be the algorithm used to explain the actions you would want to create. For example, IF I post a photo on Instagram, THEN also post it to my Twitter account—but not as a link but as an actual Twitter photo instead. Possible? Yes!

Through the IF application, you can easily set up any action, connection, or “recipe” as they call it with ease. You don’t have to be a master programmer, but there’s a bit of a learning curve when it comes to getting familiar with creating a custom recipe.

One of the great features of the app is the online community of people who have probably created the recipe you’re wanting to set up on your phone. The “Recommended” section allows you to browse through the most used or liked recipes. While the “Collections” section allows you to browse through several grouped apps that have generated recipes specific to iOS or Android phones or even recipes to boost the connections between all of your social media.

There’s one particular recipe I’m sure many will use during upcoming conventions, camps, local or district events, and even #NAYC17! For example, in just a couple of weeks our district will be having our annual Holiday Youth Convention. So, IF anybody posts on Instagram or Twitter using the official hashtag, #ARHYC15, THEN save those photos to my “HYC 2015 Recap” folder. Of course this recipe could be used for many other special events or unique hashtags, for weddings, or the hashtag I’ve used since my son was born, #IsaiahDurant.

As painful it is for me to admit, the IF app offers betters recipes on Android phones by allowing users to access many more functions of the phone compared to Apple. Aside from the recipes I’ve already mentioned, I’ve listed a few of my other favorite and everyday used recipes below:

When all seems to be too good to be true, there are always some things you must first to do to create and/or enable your recipes. You will need to create your own IFTTT account, and you will also need to authorize IFTTT to your phone, camera roll, apps, social media, etc. But the access depends on which recipes you are using or creating. Be creative, and share your awesome recipes!

Visit IFTTT.com

Michael Cena serves at the youth pastor of Kingdom Student Ministries of the Pershing United Pentecostal Church in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where he currently works as a professional web developer of a local marketing agency and his own freelance business. Michael is married to his amazing wife, Hannah Faith and daddy to his studly baby boy, Isaiah Durant.