These posts are about the ways that I automate things in my life to improve my performance and/or open up time in my day.
Instead of using different apps for tracking habits or chores, I keep everything in my task manager. This made my task manager cluttered and require too much maintenance until I started automating the marking as complete of various action items via AppleScript.
I made a video explaining and demoing the process; this post also has various downloads and links to help you recreate my work.
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In my life, air travel has been a pretty rare occurrence, one or two flights a decade, maybe. That is until my son was old enough to travel; since then, we have visited Disney World twice and multiple US national parks. However, the stress and magnitude of air travel felt by an infrequent traveler have stuck with me.
You might be able to guess what tools I reached for to mitigate travel stress and repeatedly ensure successful trips.
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If you work on a mac and you are trying to reduce the repetitive tasks in your life, improve the quality of your work, or just save time, Keyboard Maestro is the best $36 you can spend. But, it can be an intimidating app when you open it. Let me give you a head start!
This post has five one-step macros to get you started using Keyboard Maestro. You can build them yourself by watching the video or checking out the screenshots, or use the download buttons to get a copy of mine.
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I trick my son (and myself) into putting away laundry by asking him to just put away his socks. Then we will come back in a minute and do his shirts. We repeat this cycle until all of his laundry is put away.
I find the same trick works on me. I want to make a new YouTube video, but that amorphous daunting task is challenging to start. I made this automation to help break up making a video into smaller tasks. This reduces the friction and makes producing videos much easier!
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Meetings are a massive part of knowledge work. So much so that being good at meetings can change the trajectory of your career. Worst case, it saves you time and reduces the number of meetings you need to attend. Best case, your preparedness and follow-through brings you higher quality opportunities and career growth. The only cost is the time you need to spend to prepare.
I made a video about a shortcut I use to automate my meeting preparation, reducing my time investment to seconds while also improving the quality of my work. Let me show you what I did.
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