I have a workflow habit.
Similar to CRIMPing and dovetailed with yak-shaving, I tend to get excited about finding new ways of working, especially when it involves automation. At current count, I have 321 Keyboard Maestro macros, 386 Shortcuts, 148 items in my “Workfllows” scripts folder, and countless other little artifacts burrowed away. I probably use about 5% of these. In many of these cases, the time I spent thinking about a better way to do something probably should have been used to just do the thing. (Although, see Dr. Drang’s thinking on “Why we automate” for a more optimistic view.)
As we know, I am hardly unique. Making fun of ourselves for this kind of tendency is a common theme here.
This thread is not for that! I want to hear the (long-term) success stories.
What has stuck for you? What little workflows did you build months or years ago that has continued to be a key part of your way of working? What process innovations have had huge payoffs?
I can start.
A few months ago I adapted HEY email’s concept of email screening. I accomplish this by adding contacts to contact groups and using Fastmail filters to automatically slot new messages into one of four places: my inbox (for actual messages from real people), Info (order confirmations, delivery notices, etc.), Reads (newsletters and such), and New (never-before-seen senders).
It took effort to set it all up. I had to set up and start paying for Fastmail. Making it easy to add new senders to the contact groups was a huge pain. Not all email apps make it easy to navigate to these subfolders.
However, for the first time in years, I’ve been consistently getting back to people quickly and keeping my inbox clean. Granted, every few weeks, I’ll get busy and things will build up, but even then, busting those clots is far easier than it had ever been. “Email anxiety” has basically been zero.
(I think this worked because it dropped the cognitive effort required to evaluate each message in each category to near-nothing. I know that 90% of the messages in my Inbox require a reply and/or an action. 90% of the messages in Info and Reads can be immediately archived.)
To celebrate this a little, frankly, this kind of benefit justifies all of the “wasted” time with other non-sticky workflows. This set up required a bunch of skills I developed playing with Shortcuts and Applescript and trialling different email apps and services. Email has historically been a major source of pain and failure for me. Getting past that is huge!
I look forward to hearing your success stories. 
Screening permanently removes a bunch of little cognitive annoyances, as you’ve described. So does sending most non-human email to paper trail (all email there is auto-read so you just scan the subject lines.) I’ve also settled into a good routine of clearing out my reply later stack (you can reply to all emails in one view) every other day or so.
