Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
• Fill out a Web form with my contact information
• Click your pointer at a spot 50 pixels from the left edge and 120 pixels from the
top edge of the frontmost window
Subjective or creative tasks:
• Select all the flowers in an image
• Find all allusions to LOST
• Compose a poem
• Fill out a Web form with your opinions on survey questions
• Click your pointer on the photo of the most appetizing pastry
Broadly speaking, mechanical tasks are the ones that most readily lend themselves to
automation. While writing this topic, 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,youcanautomatesuchtasks(andsequencesoftasks)evenincaseswherevariables
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.
