Automating Your Worklife

This started as a simple audit of the automations I have set up over the years, and that I still use. It got to the point where I felt like sharing in hopes others may benefit from the ideas here.

This list is organised by where the automation runs, and then doesn’t follow any particular order. It’s also not complete, it includes automations that over the years turned out to be useful to me, or that I have configured recently.

Sometimes, for specific projects, I may set up an automation while it lasts.

Johnny Five

I’ve named my home computer in honor of the main character of the movie Short Circuit (1986). It’s running Ubuntu Linux and Node-RED, which I use to set up automatic flows based on triggers. Credit goes to Rui Carmo for telling me about Node-RED for automation.

Johnny uses Telegram to communicate because it is easier to configure, and allows me to add a specific notification sound to his messages.

• Email Management

  • Notifies me of important messages.
  • Finds my invoices and files them in a shared folder for my accountant.
  • Differentiates between personal and business invoices for the Lisbon Collective.

• Database Searches

  • Receives instructions via Telegram to search specific personal databases.

• Content Monitoring

  • Listens to Gregory MS and sends real-time notices for new relevant articles or clinical trials.

• Social Media Management

  • Reads my bookmarks and posts to BlueSky and Mastodon based on specific manual tags.

• Home Automation

  • Activates the vacuum cleaner at specific times when I am not home.
  • Dims down the lights and changes color temperature at sunset.

• Website and Content Publishing

  • Notices when I have written a new blog post, builds the static site, and publishes it.
  • Finds the latest post on my Weekly Notes and sends it to newsletter subscribers.
  • Syncs my bookmarks with the website once per hour.

• Health Management

  • Sends an email to the hospital pharmacy when I am running out of medication.

• Notification Services

  • Generates an image for an Instagram story based on new posts or messages.
  • Notifies me if Gregory MS received a donation or if my website or a client’s website is down.

Laptop Automation

I’m using a MacOS laptop, with Python, regular command line terminal scripts, Apple Shortcuts, and its big brother: Keyboard Maestro.

• Python Scripts

  • Publishes my blog.
  • Converts Obsidian notes into Word documents and markdown files with Zotero references for APA formatting.
  • Translates a markdown file from my blog using Deepl.com.
  • Processes a markdown file into a Lisbon Collective document.

• Shell Scripts

  • Updates software on all of my servers.

• Apple Shortcuts

  • Resizes images to a specific size and processes them through Image Optim App.
  • Sends an invoice file to Johnny Five for filing as a personal or business invoice.
  • Cleans up the desktop by organizing files into specific folders based on naming conventions.
  • Downloads all my Instagram photos and turns them into blog posts.

• Keyboard Maestro

  • Insert the current date and time when I type :date:.
  • Finds text in images on the clipboard and pastes it using a specific keyboard shortcut.
  • Converts the selected text to lower case, UPPER CASE, Title Case, or kebab-case.
  • Executes a script to open a browser, find all clinical trials for multiple sclerosis, and download the export file.
  • Finds the corresponding PDF file for a list of DOI numbers in the clipboard.

Slack for the #Lisbon Collective

Slack is an instant messaging app like Microsoft Teams and comes with a good collection of integrations that can be added without any code. We are using it to keep the Lisbon Collective in sync, to avoid emails, and save us time with two integrations:

• The Notion integration posts any task updates on #Notion to a channel.
• Google Drive was also installed to Notify users of any document shared with them.

#Gregory-MS

This is a bonus. I run the Gregory-MS project to research new treatments for Multiple Sclerosis (MS). I get an automatic email every two days with the list of published research and the #AI prediction for relevancy to patients. The relevant articles are confirmed or dismissed manually and the resulting list is sent weekly to other patients and doctors.

Gregory has over 23,000 articles in the database and I have flagged 945 as being relevant to patients.

The system also runs a few automatic tasks to keep the database clean and useful:

1. Check other databases for the article’s DOI number to fill in missing data.
2. Finds the authors of each paper and their ORCID.
3. Categorises the articles automatically.
4. Extracts a paragraph with the main takeaways of the abstract to confirm or dismiss as relevant.

Gregory can also be used for other research topics. Everything is available at Gregory-AI.com.

Hope this helps you in any way. Drop me a line if you have any questions.