Who can help me to make me more efficient through automation? (happy to pay this wizard)
I love automation and have installed all the classics on my Mac - text expander, hazel, keyboard maestro, zapier etc.
At the same time I run a digital storytelling studio and my time is very limited. Although I love trying out and installing workflows myself, I miss the time for that – which is unfortunate, because new automations in the process could certainly save me a lot of time.
I was thinking, why don’t I ask in the community, if an automation Wiz would be of interest to support me. I have some ideas and would of course be willing to pay for this work. Who will help me and my little digital storytelling studio?
This is like when my Mum asked me to go to the supermarket, but never gave me a shopping list. So obviously, I just bought 200 bags of cheese & onion crisps.
Ok – I reframe the question: Are you an allrounder, curious to find new and better ways and are motivated to help out? If yes, I am happy to give you the specifics.
Honestly that categorisation sounds like a large number of people on here who share ideas and advice freely.
With the remit being so broad and the fact that you want it done for you as a service, It sounds kind of like you want a part-timeIT person on your staff.
Are you sure you can’t spend time learning a bit of automation yourself? Learning a few bits will make you self sufficient to some extent and teach you new ways to think which will inevitably open up other ideas for automation. It’s the gift that keeps on giving because the time you invest now you can recoup many times over down the road.
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In addition to what @sylumer stated above, you’ll undoubtedly find that there’s a wealth of knowledge and experience available from the users of this forum, without charge, and motivated to help. If you’re looking to hire, there are sites that are probably better for sourcing applicants, such as GitHub or StackOverflow. But if you have any automation queries or tasks that could be:
- asking which automation tool is most suited to a particular purpose;
- a specialist question that only those intimate with Hazel could possibly answer;
- an invitation to brainstorm about the different ways to approach a specific problem where everyone can contribute from their own sphere of knowledge and learn even more by reading other’s;
- a How Do I… question for achieving a specific objective;
then this is a pretty good place for any of these, and whilst I don’t endorse depriving a freelancer a well-deserved fee for a superior, fully-tested, and complete solution, I have seen some full step-by-step, from-beginning-to-end submissions on here that probably could earn a commission but were just shared for the love of automating the crap out of everything and because someone asked for it.
Whichever avenues you explore to achieve your goals, I hope your ideas get the attention they need. I recommend a good launcher (Alfred is well-known, but there are some excellent open source ones that are more capable in certain areas), and Karabiner (an open-source kernel extension that allows keys to be remapped).
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