How I use home automation for work

Slack channel called `# availability` where we mark when we are working. It's not about tracking how many hours you work, but we have people working from multiple locations (different country, city, being at a conference). In general, when you do not sit next to someone in the same room, it's hard to tell whether they are already working or you can disturb them. We are not sure this is the right way to tackle with this but usually, this is how we figure out things: trial and error.

But I'm too lazy to write a Hello message, even though I read others' Hello message I tend to forget write mine. So that led me to reuse my Home Assistant for this purpose. I use device tracking with owntracks but I never leveraged the possibilities of owntracks and device tracking in general.

If I'm near the office (about 200 meters) I receive a notification on my phone where there's a Checkin button which sends a Hello message to Slack. It looks like this:

I have the same for Checkout:

I've been using this setup for a couple of days and I'm quite happy because I see that I'm available and I do not need to manually type the Hello and Bye messages every day.

Technical details