Launch Your Work Apps with One Click
Since working from home I’ve noticed that I’ve fallen into a nice morning routine: shower, cup of tea, watch Seth Meyers, head up to my home office, and open up all my apps for work.
But that last one was starting to bug me. Like many of you, I’m using my personal computer to do my work, which means at the end of the day I have a tendency to close out of all of my non work related applications, only to have to re-open them every morning. And while it’s not the hardest part of the day, I found myself growing tired of clicking 4 little items in my dock each and every morning.
“There has to be a better way!” I thought.
Of course there is. It’s called Automator.
If you’re not a “Mac Power User” you might not be super familiar with this app. It ships with every single Mac, and allows you to do some pretty incredibly stuff; I myself have barely even scratched the surface of what it can do (though if you ever used my Editing Folders app freebie, that was also built with automator).
One of those things you can do is build "apps” that when run activate a series of “actions”; in this case launch all of the apps I need to do my day-to-day work. And building this little app takes only minutes.
First, you’ll want to launch Automator.
You’ll then want to create a new document, specifically an “Application” document. This will create a self contained application you can pop in your dock and when launched your actions will run.
In the search bar, type in “launch”, and double click “Launch Application”. This will add the action to your workflow. In my case, it defaults to launch “Contacts” but it might default to a different app for you. Click the drop-down within the action, and select “Other…” from the menu. This should open up a window with your Applications folder. From there select the application you want to launch. In my case, that’s Slack.
Repeat this step with all the applications you want to launch, until you have all the apps you need.
Once you’re done, give it a name (I went with “Start Work”) and save it to your applications folder.
And that’s it! Add the application to your dock, and click it. It will then launch your chosen applications, saving you a bunch of clicks.
Again, this only scratches the surface of what is possible with Automator. And while I realize that I’ve basically only saved myself maybe 5 seconds of work every morning, it brings me a little bit of joy every single morning. Now all I need to do is add that Brian Eno Windows 95 boot sound, and my morning will be perfect.