You know that entrepreneurs are busy people, they work hard and they work smart, but did you know that the Mac can work smart for you? You can automate any and all of what you do on your Mac to make yourself more productive.
Understand there are various levels of automating tasks on a Mac, from the simple to the complex and depending on the level of your needs will require more technical knowledge the more complex it gets. So how can you make your life easier? Here’s the ideas to make sure you get more done in less time:
- Templates – creating templates of your regular and repeatable documents speeds up what you do by not having to recreate from scratch something that works for you. You can download a number of SCORE’s business templates from their web site, for example.
- Automator – using Apple’s Automator you can make actionable tasks that the computer does to make various apps do things for you.
- Applescript – with Apple’s scripting language you can control, and communicate among, applications, databases, networks, Web services, and even the operating system itself.
- Scripting – for those understand the Mac’s UNIX heritage, are programmers, or are an expert at PHP, PERL, or Ruby On Rails you can write scripts to automate more detailed tasks. Normally this is used for larger amounts of data between databases and the like. Check with a programmer to see if you need this level of scripting. Not every business nail needs a hammer, a tack hammer or a sledge hammer may be needed depending on the task at hand.
So, there you have the basics of getting more productive on your Mac. The one thing that you need to know that you automate only those things that you repeat a lot such as something daily or that takes a lot of time and you have to do it over and over again. Automating things requires a few things before it is applicable to your task:
- Repeatable – your task should be something that you are constantly doing the same thing over and over, not something that is a one time thing, unless it is a large project.
- Frequent – the frequency of the task such as a number of times during the day
- Accurate and consistent – you need accuracy in what you are doing.
- Large project – a large project that needs to be accurate and fast, such as doing a monthly column or your finance books each month that covers a lot of data.
- Fast – automating your typing ensure that it is done correctly and accurately each time you tell your Mac to do the task.
So, what do you need to automate?
