Introduction
If you’ll forgive the cliché, life is too short. I have long-term goals and dreams that need my attention. And every single day, I have work to do, a family to take care of, books to read, and TV shows to watch. I don’t have time to waste on tedious tasks that my expensive, modern Mac is perfectly capable of doing for me.
This book is about taking back your time by automating your Mac, which sounds like a fancy and high-tech undertaking. But in fact, all I mean by “automating” is finding shortcuts—ways to do the same thing, only more quickly and easily, with fewer manual steps. That might be as simple as learning a keyboard shortcut for a common command, or scheduling a task to run at a certain time. You can do more advanced things, too, like using macro utilities or writing AppleScripts, but you may be surprised to find that some of the most powerful and effective automation techniques require the least effort and skill to set up. In many cases, you won’t even need extra software.
I want to emphasize that you do not have to be a programmer or computer geek to do most of this stuff. I do mention a few techniques that require above-average technical chops, but I’ve written this book for ordinary—smart but non-technical—readers. On the other hand, if you are a computer geek, I hope you’ll find some ideas here that you can use to make your work even more efficient than it already was.
Let me share a personal story. There’s a certain bookkeeping task that used to take me about 5 minutes a day. After running through it a few hundred times, I decided that I couldn’t stand it any longer. So I spent a full day working up a very snazzy macro that combined Keyboard Maestro with AppleScript—two tools I discuss later in this book—to perform the whole task without any intervention at all.
Now, you may be thinking, “That’s madness! What kind of idiot would spend a whole day automating something that takes just 5 minutes?” Well, this idiot did it to save time. If I spent 8 hours perfecting my macro, that’s equivalent to 5 minutes a day for about 3 months. Which means that after 3 months of using the macro, I get 5 extra minutes every single day to spend with my kids—more than 30 hours over the course of a year. All of a sudden, that sounds pretty smart!
That’s an extreme example—rarely would I spend so much time automating a single task—but it nicely illustrates my objective. I invest a bit of up-front setup time to shave off a few seconds here, a few minutes there, from tasks that I perform over and over. My work becomes less frustrating, and I’m freed up to concentrate on more interesting and creative tasks. Whether I get more work done in the same amount of time or the same amount of work done in less time, the result is the same—higher productivity and greater happiness.
Many of the topics I discuss are deep, and I can only scratch the surface in a book like this. For example, Sal Soghoian and Bill Cheeseman once wrote an 895-page book on AppleScript, but I spend just a chapter on it. Other Take Control authors penned entire titles about LaunchBar and TextExpander, which I cover only briefly. And I could write hundreds of pages about Keyboard Maestro, Nisus Writer Pro macros, and other topics. Automation is a virtually endless subject, but I’m sure you don’t want to read thousands of pages about it!
Instead, I want to do just three things with this book:
Show you lots of automation tools and techniques for your Mac.
Offer concrete examples you can use as is or adapt to your needs.
Inspire you with lists of further possibilities and learning resources.
Unless otherwise noted, all the techniques in this book work with macOS 10.12 Sierra through 10.15 Catalina, and likely beyond. Most of them work in older Mac operating systems, too—perhaps with minor modifications. I haven’t spelled out all those differences or compatibility issues, but in general, the older your operating system, the less likely you’ll find that everything works as described.