What workflows or automations have stuck/paid off for you?

I’m not sure I can explain it. It takes a little bit of creative guessing to get the rule to find the info you need in the file’s text. In my case, most of the files are bills that I like to name using the billing date and the company name.

I wish I could point you to wherever I learned it. I thought I learned it from @macsparky’s Hazel Field Guide, but it turns out that I didn’t buy that one. Maybe I learned it from somebody else’s post here?

Noodlesoft has a pretty good manual that explains how to have a rule search a file’s text contents. See the section describing “Contents” on the Attribute Reference page. That would be the place to start.

great, thanks for the tip

Screenshots goes to Yoink drawer. I use a Hazel automation for this.

I screenshot daily for projects, the MacOD Catalina feature where screenshot linger on for a few seconds is great but I do more than one. It make sense to screenshot multiple times and have it consolidate in Yoink to be either drag on to a Keynote slide or Finder.

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keystroke to create a markdown link (using title and url) for the the web page I’m on, in any of four browsers, along with capturing any selected text as a markdown quote.

I need this. How do you do that, please?

@fuzzygel Further to @tonycraine, I also use Hazel to scan and file incoming. To help you get going, here is the Hazel rule for AMEX monthly statement.

I use Hazel for a lot of things.

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Without the slightest doubt the (semi-) automated workflow that is of greatest value to me is the one I use to export diary entries from Day One into DEVONthink—and then, in DEVONthink, update the Day One links (i.e., cross-references to other diary entries) to DEVONthink links and convert Day One hastags to YAML front matter.

That uses Hazel, shell script and then (once in DEVONthink) DEVONthink smart rules and extensive AppleScript (plus Keyboard Maestro for an incredibly useful conflict palette).

The reason the workflow is so valuable to me is that it gives me the ability to journal using the Day One interface combined with the ability to use the phenomenal DEVONthink search facilities (which put Day One’s search facility in the shade). I use DEVONthink search several times every day to search my 50+ years of diary entries.

Stephen

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Thanks a lot @rms , this is so cool !!

Glad to point you! In support of what @tonycraine says, you have to play detective a bit on the documents to notice and figure out what makes the incoming document “unique” and then use Hazel’s features to extract and use content from the documents as you wish. Another tip is to put all the incoming into one folder. I use “Scanner Input” for everything coming in to me (whether scanned, downloaded, or in emails). Then Hazel has to look only at that folder, using a list of rules.

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Automations that I use multiple times a day: inserting dates using TextExpander, arranging finder windows with moom, multiple Hazel automations to rename and move downloaded or scanned documents (what a pleasure!)

Automation that probably saves most time and helps to avoid inconsistencies (used approx once or twice weekly):

  • a rather long shortcuts shortcut that I use to automate everything around invitations for talks: it creates OmniFocus projects with 15 tasks (and associated deadlines etc), calendar entries, Craft documents, the correctly named folder with subfolders in the correct location.

Martin

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OMG, please share this one if you could, or how I could go about learning to do this this myself. NHL scheduling is madness in and unto itself and despite my best efforts to stay on top of it I regularly miss games.

Most of my workflows/automations depend on Drafts. A few of them:

  • Drafts: tap on a widget item to create/open daily journal; based on a template, includes current “top of mind” principles and collates active reminders and calendar items for the day, with a header for my goals for the day, four time block headers and a carryover/tomorrow header.

  • Drafts: review yesterday: action that appends a list of links to drafts modified created yesterday to yesterday’s daily journal, along with any completed reminders.

  • Drafts: new project: create a reminder item with project details, along with a linked iThoughts map (I track projects as reminders via GoodTask, which allows for a kanban view, among other things).

  • Drafts: open/reference project: lists active projects with options to copy a project code, copy a project link or open project assets (item(s) in reminders; iThoughts map)

  • Drafts: workout log: create new workout log based on choice of templates; with associated actions to log reps/weight/duration per exercise and log duration of workout to calendar when complete.

  • Drafts: log duration of time tracked task to calendar when complete; if task has an associated reminder, open GoodTask to mark that reminder done.

  • Shortcuts: overnight (4am) automations to capture stats for Charty widgets; mostly drawn from data in Drafts…

  • Shortcuts: convert Youtube link to Invidious link (using this shamefully often of late).

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I started listing all of the little things that make my life just a little bit easier, most of which are so ingrained I’d forgotten that I set them up.

And then my daily SuperDuper backup started. So the ones that have paid off for me are:

  • Time Machine
  • SuperDuper
  • Chronosync
  • Backblaze

I’ve set these up over the years and they just happen. And they’ve saved me on more than one occasion.

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It’s pretty clever — I used a macro I found on the KM forums that worked with Chrome, Firefox and Safary, but modified it to also include Brave; at some point I’ll do the same with Edge if I need it enough.

I didn’t mention it initially, but it also captures any text selected on the page and inserts it as a markdown blockquote after the title/url link.

Here’s the macro I invoke when looking at a web page:

The first action of that macro calls a more complicated macro (the one I found on the KM forums and then modified) — see below. Happy to send you the .kmmacros files for both if that’s useful. I’m not sure if the forum will let me post them here.

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There are a few Shortcuts I created that I’ve been using every day. They are so simple, it is hard to believe, but Shortcuts was the glue that made it stick. 3 of them are shortcuts for Things. One is to show me my Errands, another to show my Phone list and third to show tasks I marked Important.

The other shortcut is from a developer named @ryanjamurphy that launches a log item for my Obsidian daily note.

The last one I use every day is a Shortcut I developed to show me the pdf front page of the NY Times.

So my conclusion is you don’t have to have long sophisticated automations, short and simple can also make things work the way you want.

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This is a little adjacent to what you might have meant, @ryanjamurphy, but one thing I’ve done that took some investment but feels like it’s paid off is to go through the trouble of assigning photos to people I text regularly and also creating companies and putting their logos as their contact image for automated texts I get from companies. Here’s a screenshot of my messages app sidebar, for example:

(The calendar one is from an automated service that reminds me of an appointment I have)

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In terms of workflow, my main workflow improvement has been to move from Evernote (good memories there) and finally settling up on a totally file-based archive on iCloud, with KM/BTT macros for launching Finder windows with my favourite folders, which also include managing my bookmarks as .webloc files in Finder.

Setting a keyboard macro to insert a sortable date (like 20221117) allow me to name my files with that timestamp and having a hard timestamp that will resist migrations, copys, moves, and not change because it is in the title so sorting by name will sort by date (this may or may not work for everyone).

In terms of knowledge management at work, my personal triumph has been slowly building up a document repository… on a Google Sheet file with links to other Google Slides documents. I work as a technology strategy consultant so having access to all my previous deliverables to find the specific deck I am looking for is key, so the Sheets document includes info like language, clients, industries, practices, success cases, technical architectures and the associated proposal budget.

It’s amazing how even the most simple workflows deliver great values.

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I use KM pretty extennsivly liek you with moving windows / confit palletts (best thing I’ve implemented in the last 3 years to free up other to keys)

What does hammerspoon do that you are not able to accomplish with KM? I use to have Karibiner-Elements just for the Caps Lock / Hyperkey Macros I setup in KM. Now i just use hyperkey app for that which is far more lightweight. BUt I haven’t heard of hammerspoon curious to its function.

@fuzzygel What I found useful for some tricky documents was to select the text in the PDF (all of the files I do this with are PDFs) and then paste the text into a text editor like BBEdit that can show you all of the spaces and invisible characters that exist in that text that you can’t see in the PDF but that Hazel will see. Your attempts to write patterns that will match will be much more informed.

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First and maybe most pivotal step for me is always to find a version of the schedule that I can open in a spreadsheet. The NHL doesn’t appear to offer that on its main site, but I found one on the media site at the bottom of this page.

I start by doing some data cleaning in the spreadsheet, eliminating columns I don’t want and changing some formatting with find and replace. For instance, I’d use three-letter city abbreviations instead of the full city names this spreadsheet uses. Much easier to read in Monthly view or when you’re checking an iPhone calendar. I used to have AppleScript make that change programmatically, but it’s a little brittle (the way I know how to do it with my primitive coding skills), so eventually I just started doing it during the cleaning stage.

Once I have the data cleaned, I have an AppleScript go row-by-row, assigning each row/event to a calendar. I’ve switched back and forth between using Fantastical or Calendar as the target app, although off the top of my head I can’t remember why. I think maybe Fantastical chokes on certain symbols or something. I’ll take a look at my scripts when I have a chance. (Only have my iPad with me right now.) I think they could be generalized fairly easily.

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I also tried Hey.com and adopted the ideas to Fastmail.

Created a small guide many months ago. Wanted to also create guides for other mail providers but never did.

Feel free to have a look

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