Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
For the purposes of this topic, 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 topic 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
byhand—tasks suchassortingyourincoming email, monitoring salesfigures,ormoving 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.
Learn What You Can Automate
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.
Mechanical tasks:
• Select all the black pixels in an image
• Find all capitalized words in italics
• Type a predefined chunk of text
