Ask HN: What do you automate in your workflow?

Email addresses customized to the merchant/sender and lots of email filters to route incoming messages to folders.

I've often thought that there's more value in extending office apps than is taken advantage of. It's an interesting case where it's difficult to make an extension that can do "anything", but relatively simple to make an extension that can do one simple task really, really well.

My entire environment was hand crafted from the ground up, so I guess “everything” is my response.

I have built a programmable tooltip for Mac. It works on any app. I use this hundreds of times a day at work for 2y now.

You can select any text and activate the tooltip with the short key. Then, the tooltip offers a list of options like jumping to URL, showing some extra info.

You are the one who write the script to process the text and return the options.

You can check it out here: github.com/tanin47/tip

PS. I configure a mouse button to trigger the Tip short key, so it is even more convenient.

Mostly what I do is build the workflow to match pre-existing tools, rather than build tools to match a workflow.

I do use a massive amount of off-the-shelf automation though.

Even for very small personal servers, I make sure that everything is Ansible-ed.

I make a lot of use of Obsidian features like daily notes templates, I use YoSmart and Tile, etc. I keep my entire music collection, all my books, and some important documents synced with SyncThing on all my devices.

But in general I just don't have a reason to automate much of anything, I try to choose things that just work, and if that's not possible, I try to do it at the source(I'd rather add support for another file format, or switch to a tool that has wider support, that add a converter utility).

I'm pretty obsessed with future proofing, and usually choose large and popular software, so it's rare that I want a feature that isn't already there.

I (unfortunately) mostly work on windows machines. I use autohotkey extensively. Amazing at gluing disperate software together, hotstrings, hotkeys; and as a programming language, for a beginner, the documentation is second to none.

I have extensive bookmarklets for doing stuff in browser where autohotkey can't see much.

And like you, since I have to work in ms office, VBA is a must. Autohotkey can do VBA too but sometimes it's just easier in app.

Mine are:

- Context switching (ala GTD) e.g. switching to dev-mode, or buisdev-mode, or analytics-mode

- Focused variants. Same as above but all others things are shutdown

- All devops and the automations are the documentation

- Switching light/dark mode (aka garden vs office work-modes)

- Data wrangling (moving important data around)

I’m missing health-monitoring automations but I’ve not yet clearly worked through what I want here (but i like what Bearable are doing).

1. A script who help me to make conventional commits name (ex: `feat(xyz): add some stuff. JIRA-ID`). It add Jira Id at the end using git branch, get scope using path of the folder and ask me the rest

2. Create a markdown file for the day as worklog. An another script create markdown file for the Jira issue that I work on and add a wikilink on the worklog

3. Read scripts in package.json and ask me what I want to execute using fzf

I try to do more and more since it's really useful and I had some fun to made them.