A Day in the Life of an Automator

I’ve been working on a blog post that details from the moment my alarm wakes me up to the moment I turn in a catalog of all the automations that help me get through my day. I mostly want it for self-documentation… but then I realized that what I really want is to read a bunch of you telling the same story!

I haven’t seen too much like this… but I think it’d be fun. You can post in here, make a video, post on your blog post… live tweet a thread… maybe use some hashtag on social media if you do roll that way?

I’ll try to get mine written up and posted in here before too long, but I wanted to get the ball rolling in y’all’s minds as well.

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Ok! I typed up a day of automation… lots of desktop scripting automation for me, and some iOS shortcuts: http://evantravers.com/articles/2020/11/07/day-of-automation/

Anyone else want to give a #dayofautomation post a whirl?

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I love this idea!

Here’s a brief take on my own “day of automation.”

My alarm goes off, which I reluctantly get out of bed to turn off. As I take my phone off the wireless charger, it automatically turns off the alarm, which is a godsend. Next, it runs a simple Shortcut that opens a few apps to update themselves: Weather, Superhuman (email), Todoist, and Drafts. This shortcut is crucial for making sure my widgets are also up-to-date.

While getting out of the shower, I’ll yell at Siri to “Tell Courtney good morning,” which will randomly put together a short version of telling my Fiance good morning and has a few different combinations — judge me if you must. :joy:

Once I’ve gotten ready for the day, I’ll triple-tap the back of my iPhone to trigger another Shortcut, which connects my Airpods via Bluetooth, and begins playing a podcast for my walk to work.

Once at work, I’ll use Alfred to launch into my usual sites for checking in on reports/data. I use a specific syntax for this: [app/site] — [task/area].

If I want to see how our Google Ads are doing, I will type in “Ads — Overview” as an example, which takes me to the exact view desired.

I usually have a barrage of emails to power through. I’ll use Alfred to open Superhuman and the built-in keyboard shortcuts for getting through them all. I use text expansion heavily — I would estimate ~25% of emails are handled this way.

During our daily standup, I’ll pull out Drafts to ensure nothing was missed. If a new task comes up, I’ll type “td,” which expands into “- [ ],” where I will include the task. Once the meeting is complete, I’ll trigger a Drafts action to import those tasks into Todoist.

This is where it gets a bit tricky to track. Because my days are varied, I may or may not utilize a handful of other automation, not including those that automatically triggered themselves to complete a task without my knowledge; my favorite!

Towards the end of the day, I’ll trigger a Keyboard Maestro automation to close all applications and run through a Clean My Mac X workflow as I grab my bag.

On the way home, I’ll put in my Airpods and tell Siri to call Courtney to see how her day was and catch up — we’re currently in different states, so catching up is incredibly important.

When I get home, I’ll tell Siri to turn on the TV using Switch Bot (I have not upgraded my TV in a while) and open Netflix (usually Star Trek: Next Generation) on the Apple TV.

Around sunset, my lights will automatically turn on.

Then, precisely at 9 pm EST, the lamps will turn off and back on to let me know it’s time to turn off the TV and begin reading to wind down.

Lastly, my lights automatically turn off at 10 pm EST, and my phone triggers a Shortcut workflow to turn on the alarm, open Dark Noises, and turn on Airplane mode when it connects to the wireless charger.

The above is a typical day of automation for me but does not include the stuff that I barely notice anymore, like text expansion, Zapier Zaps that trigger on their own, and I’m sure a bit more.

Now that I’ve written this out, I automate much more than I anticipated.

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This is epic!

I’ll bet you’d like Bunch if you haven’t tried it yet… it sounds ideal for some of your “computing spaces.”

I was just listening to one of the podcast episodes talking about Bunch. I’ll need to give it a try!

I’m working on simplifying my “automation stack” so I can streamline my automation efforts further. I plan on putting together a post to bring up this topic as a community soon. :raised_hands:

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Thank you for the td tip.

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Hi Dillon - did you ever do your review? I’m working on this over Christmas. I’m trying to rationalise a lot of duplicate ways of doing things, working out which apps and processes are most reliable and so forth.

If you have a link to anything you produced I’d be really grateful to see it.

All good wishes,

Brian

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This one is huge

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