I’m very much into automating things as much as possible. That stretches through to how I use my computers and at work and home I try to add shortcuts to automate flows. Here are some of my key ones.

Home

Morning catchup

Every morning I grab my breakfast and go through the same list of apps and websites to prepare for the day. I’ve simply got a shortcut that opens in order:

• Netnewswire
• Social forums
• Email
• YNAB
• Things 3

After I’ve finished with each app I just ping back to the shortcuts window and it opens the next. It means every day I can be sure that I’ve processed everything I need right at the start of the day.

Weekly processing

Similar to the morning catchup I have a shortcut that implements a similar flow that opens apps to the content that I may need to organise for the week. This is things like Download folders, articles starred to read, etc. Basically anything that can be considered an inbox. This lets me keep things organised and turn things into actionable items.

Tracking purchases

I’ve got a simple shortcut that when I make an online purchase I run the shortcut to add the item to Things 3 as ’to be delivered’. That helps me easily keep track of if a delivery has gone missing.

Apple text replacement

I find my email address annoying to type out. I’ve simply set it so typing @me is replaced with my address. With the frequency that you need to type your email address this is a pretty handy time saver.

Work

Daily standup

Using Alfred at work I have a simple shortcut that just opens up my Jira backlog and starts the correct zoom meeting ready for me to start sharing. It’s an incredibly trivial action but as it’s something I have to do every day it’s something work automating.

Music

In my office I tend to listen to a set playlist. A simple shortcut on my phone connects directly to my bluetooth speaker and starts the playlist in shuffle mode. There’s definitely more I want to do for automating my work environment but for now that’s still useful.

Snippets

The snippets feature in Alfred is invaluable. Just having some ready to go boilerplate for debugging some databases I’ve been working on has been a massive timesaver as connecting via psql in a docker container in a remote kubernetes cluster has zero chance of returning the right query when pressing the up keyboard arrow.

Apple text replacement

Again, super minor, but I’m responsible for approving my teams timesheets. I can do this by simply replying to the timesheet email with the work APPROVED. I found myself mistyping that so I’ve just added a simple replacement of zapp to APPROVED to minimise the errors.