Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Consider Routine Tasks
I may have given you the impression that automation is best suited for tasks you
perform many times a day. It's true that the more often you perform a task, the more
you'll benefit from automating it. But you might also want to consider automating
tasks you perform less frequently—say, once a week, once a month, or once a quarter.
Do you have to prepare a monthly expense report? A quarterly summary of customer
support email messages? An annual chart of sales statistics? It may be worth the effort
to figure out how to automate those tasks as well (or portions of them, anyway).
You may not be able to predict how long it will take you to create the workflow, script,
or macro needed for such a task, but in general, I like to see my automation efforts
amortized within a few months. For example, if a quarterly task takes an hour to do
manually, and I can automate it with an hour's work, I'll see that time savings the
next quarter. Spending an entire day automating an annual task that would otherwise
take only 15 minutes makes much less sense—it could take the rest of your career to
recoup that lost time.
Set Yourself Up for Success
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
