I think of myself as a relatively lazy person. I mean, yes, this is my 45th Take Control book in less than 11 years. And yes, I’ve written numerous other books, too, not to mention hundreds of articles for Macworld and TidBITS. And sure, I run a company and speak all over the world and have a wife and two young kids. Apart from those minor exceptions and maybe a dozen others, I’m pretty much a layabout.
But, there’s more than one way to think about laziness. When it comes to your Mac, a good form of laziness is not wanting to spend unnecessary time doing something that’s tedious or repetitive. A bad form of laziness is not bothering to figure out how to save yourself that effort later on.
I frequently interrupt my work to spend a half hour figuring out how best to automate a task that might take me a minute to do manually. But if I save a minute several times every day, that half hour pays for itself in no time. And from then on, I’m more efficient and happier. Even if a certain automation technique saves only a second or two, those seconds add up in a big way over time.
But saving time isn’t the only reason to automate activities on your Mac. You’ll also make your work more consistent and accurate. Automation can prevent small errors that would otherwise trip you up, and save you the annoyance of looking up forgotten details.
As you read about automation methods, I want you to accept the fact that you’ll have to spend (not “waste”) time learning, experimenting, and setting things up, and that this work is going to be a temporary drag on your productivity. Don’t worry about it. The end result will make you much more productive. Bear in mind, too, that the effort-to-reward ratio is least favorable at the beginning, as you’re getting to know the tools and techniques. But as you gain experience, you’ll find that smaller amounts of effort produce greater rewards.
Your biggest challenge may be figuring out what you can automate and how. That’s what I want to address in the remainder of this chapter.
I alluded to this in the Introduction, but I want to make sure it’s clear:
For the purposes of this book, automation means finding shortcuts—easier ways to do the same things you’re already doing regularly.
I use such a broad and inclusive definition because I want you to get in the habit of looking for easier ways to do things on your Mac without the psychological barrier of thinking that automation is some intensely technical process only a computer geek could grasp.
You probably wouldn’t have bought this book if you weren’t already interested in the value of simple labor-saving shortcuts: if there’s something you do frequently that requires three clicks and you can come up with a way to do it with one click instead, you’ve saved yourself some effort. Or maybe you have a regular task that normally requires a dozen keystrokes and you can do it with a single menu command instead.
Once you feel confident finding shortcuts like these, you can work your way up to the more conventional sense of automation—setting up your Mac to perform complex sequences of useful tasks without any intervention. These could be tasks you would do any way, or they could be tasks that would be too complicated, time-consuming, or onerous to bother doing by hand—tasks such as sorting your incoming email, monitoring sales figures, or moving files between disks or machines.
Keep in mind, however, that since it takes some time to set up any automation task, automation saves time only when the activity in question happens over and over again. Suppose an app has a deeply nested menu command, like Tools > Format > Paragraph > Style > Quote Level > Increase, and it’s a pain to find it and select it. You could assign it a keyboard shortcut, but if it’s a command you use only on a rare occasion, there’s no point. It would take more effort to set up (and remember) the shortcut than to search for the command manually. On the other hand, if this is a command you use several times every day, it’s certainly worth your effort to find a quicker way.
Think for a moment about the differences between tasks that can be described in purely mechanical (or objective) terms compared to tasks that require human intelligence (or subjectivity). Here are a few examples to illustrate what I mean.
Broadly speaking, mechanical tasks are the ones that most readily lend themselves to automation. While writing this book, I used automation for things like expanding abbreviations, applying styles, creating bookmarks, inserting cross-references, and modifying URLs. None of my automation tools or tricks helped me figure out what to write, however.
Your own work undoubtedly includes a mixture of mechanical and subjective or creative tasks. The more you automate mechanical tasks, the better you’ll be able to focus on the creative part of your work.
Crucially, you can automate such tasks (and sequences of tasks) even in cases where variables are involved or decisions are required—automation need not be blind. For example, you might have a macro (a structured series of automated actions) that looks at the text on a certain Web page and, depending on what that text is, takes one of three actions in response. You might have a command that runs automatically—but only on rainy days, or only if there are fewer than five messages in your email Inbox. You might even have your Mac prompt you to make a decision manually, or fill in some information, before proceeding with an automation task.
When trying to determine whether a task is ripe for automation, I like to ask myself whether it’s something I could explain to my mother how to do, over the phone. My mom is both intelligent and computer-literate, although she’s not a technophile. I could say, “Mom, go to this page in your browser. Now look at the second line from the top. Does it have a number that’s greater than 100? Then open this spreadsheet, click in the first empty cell in the second column, and type that number into that cell.” On the other hand, I would not tell my mother, “Give descriptive names to these 100 technical documents I just scanned,” because although she might give it her best shot, chances are close to nil that she and I would choose similar names—and I’d have a hard time finding a particular document.
Now it’s time for you to start making a list. You can use a text file, the Notes app on your iPad, or even (gasp!) a piece of paper, but do start making a list of tasks you might want to automate right now.
As you use your Mac, pay attention to activities that are largely mechanical in nature, that you perform more than a few times per day, and that require more than a single click, keystroke, or menu command. Jot down what those activities are, and as you read this book, look for appropriate ways to automate each task. Even if you know for sure that you want to automate something, it’s not always convenient to drop everything and do so at the moment you realize it. Having a list helps you remember what to come back to when you do have time.
In particular, I suggest concentrating on situations in which you might be able to click less, type faster, or use keyboard shortcuts.
Although it’s not a perfect measurement of complexity, it’s a convenient way to think about the effort needed to perform common tasks: How many clicks does it take?
If you click the Finder icon in your Dock to switch to the Finder, click File > New to open a new window, click the name of another Mac in the sidebar, and then click Share Screen to share the screen, that’s four clicks.
All things being equal, fewer clicks take less effort than more clicks, so if you can find ways of reducing multiple clicks to a single click (or perhaps to a keyboard combination), you’ll save effort.
Write it down: When you notice yourself performing a task two or more times a day, count and write down how many clicks it takes to complete it, remembering that one click equals a press and release. (Moving the pointer to a menu command and dragging add complexity too, but for the sake of this little experiment, you can ignore those mouse movements.) If an activity also requires keystrokes (such as entering a username, or searching for a word), count those too—we’ll come back to extra keystrokes in a moment. Any repetitive activity that requires more than two clicks could potentially be shortened. The reason for counting your clicks is so you can roughly prioritize which tasks may bring you the most gains once automated.
What to do: Pretty much any form of automation that I discuss in this book has the potential to eliminate clicks. A few areas that might especially apply, however, are these:
If you don’t already know how to touch-type (that is, type with all ten fingers, without looking at the keys), learning to do so will probably save you more time and increase your efficiency more than anything else in this book. You can find numerous free or inexpensive apps to help you learn, such as Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.
But if you’re already a touch typist, you can increase your typing speed and accuracy even further. For example, I frequently write about a product called DEVONthink Pro Office, but I never type out all 21 characters of that name. I type dtpo and my Mac expands that automatically into the full name. That not only saves time, it ensures I get all the capitalization right. I do the same thing with frequently typed names, addresses, phone numbers, URLs, dates, and other phrases—especially those that I use more than a few times a day.
Write it down: Consider all the email messages and documents you wrote in the last 24 hours, and see if you can pick out long names, phrases, and other text you used repeatedly, such as a company name, chemical name, or address. Make a note of them.
What to do: Set up shortcuts for yourself to Automate Text Expansion using OS X’s built-in tools or a third-party utility.
One premise underlying many of the automation techniques in this book is:
Using the keyboard has the potential to be considerably faster than using a mouse (or other pointing device).
To the extent that this is true, it would seem logical to learn (or create) as many keyboard shortcuts as possible. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that keyboard shortcuts are always or even usually faster than using a pointing device. (For a fascinating glimpse into research Apple did in this area in the late 1980s, read Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini’s articles “Keyboard vs. The Mouse,” part 1, part 2, and part 3.) And let’s not forget the mental effort required to learn and recall all those shortcuts!
Keyboard shortcuts are likely to be superior in certain situations:
Furthermore, if you are a touch-typist and your work involves mostly typing (in which case there’s a frequent time penalty for moving one hand from the keyboard to the pointing device and back), you’re likely to see greater efficiency improvements from using keyboard shortcuts than if you’re a hunt-and-peck typist or if your work involves more mousing than typing.
Write it down: Make a note of tasks you perform several times a day that require searching for menu commands, as well as those you repeat two or more times in a row.
What to do: In some cases, you can learn their existing shortcuts (see Use OS X’s Built-in Keyboard Shortcuts), but if they don’t have shortcuts—or you don’t like the built-in shortcuts—you can assign keyboard shortcuts to them (see Create Your Own OS X Keyboard Shortcuts and Use a Macro Utility).
I have one last suggestion on the topic of looking for automation opportunities.
Imagine you’re shopping for an optical character recognition (OCR) program, a word processor, a photo manager, or a digital audio workstation app. You’ve narrowed your choices down to two or three candidates. Which should you buy? All things being equal, I’d pick the one with the most or best automation capabilities, whether they’re built in (a macro language, let’s say) or externally driven (for example, with extensive AppleScript support).
Although most apps can be automated by brute force, as it were—having a macro utility fake a click at certain coordinates in a window, for instance—that kind of automation is difficult and error-prone. Apps that expose their functions directly to tools like Automator, AppleScript, and LaunchBar make automation much easier. That’s why I talk glowingly about the automation possibilities in Microsoft Word, Nisus Writer Pro, DEVONthink Pro Office, and 1Password. They go out of their way to make it easy for other apps to communicate with them.
You may also need to request some adjustments to the way other people send you data in order to facilitate automation. For example, data you receive in a highly structured form, such as a spreadsheet, database, or XML file, lends itself well to automation because it’s easy to instruct a computer to look in a certain field, cell, or key for a piece of data. Receiving data as a free-form PDF or Word file complicates automation, because you first have to automate the task of locating just the needle you need in a fairly large haystack.
These are just a couple of examples, but my main point is to keep automation in mind as you make decisions about the apps you use and the ways you send and receive information. Even if you don’t use those capabilities now, you may appreciate them in the future.
I talk about tons of different techniques, features, and apps in this book. I use most of them myself. But I don’t expect you to go out and buy every app I mention here, or even one of each type of app. I don’t expect you to spend the time learning Automator and AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro and Nisus Writer Pro macros and so on. You’re welcome to do that if it sounds like fun (it’s fun for me!), but for most people, that’s would be unreasonable and incredibly boring.
Instead, I suggest you read through this book with the idea of picking out just the handful of techniques and apps that give you the biggest bang for your buck (or your time). The answer will be different for each person; it’ll depend on how you use your Mac and what your biggest sources of annoyance are.
I asked myself: If I could pick only one automation tool from this book, which one would it be? For me, that tool would be Keyboard Maestro (see Control Your Mac with Keyboard Maestro), because it’s so versatile. It may not be the best launcher or the best clipboard utility or the best text-expansion tool, but it does a respectable job at all those tasks—in addition to its crucial core features of creating macros and letting you assign keyboard shortcuts to commands.
Don’t get me wrong: I’d miss LaunchBar, TextExpander, Nisus Writer Pro macros, and AppleScript every single day. So, for me, the right answer is to use a bunch of tools, each for specific purposes. But as you’re getting started in automation, learning one tool (or a few tools) more deeply is better than learning many tools only slightly.
Finally, I should caution you not to buy automation apps just because they sound cool, or because you hope to think up problems for them to solve. That’s like going to the hardware store and buying a tool without having anything you need to use it for. (Which, I admit, I’m prone to do, but I don’t recommend.) Start with the problems you want to solve, and then find an app or technique that can solve them.