The Least Impressive Automation I Have Is the One I Would Miss Most

If you asked me which of my automations I would rebuild first after losing everything, the answer is embarrassing: my text snippets. Forty short expansions triggered by abbreviations. It is the least technically interesting thing I have and it is used maybe sixty times a day.

The obvious ones are the ones everyone has. Email address, phone number, the address block. These are fine and they save a few seconds. They are not the interesting part.

The interesting part is the third category, which took me about a year to notice I was building: snippets that are not shortcuts for typing but shortcuts for deciding. My most-used snippet expands to a three-line structure for declining a meeting — a thanks, a reason, an alternative. The typing it saves is maybe fifteen seconds. What it actually saves is the two minutes I used to spend composing a decline, because declining made me slightly uncomfortable and discomfort produces rewriting. Having the shape pre-decided removed the discomfort entirely, and my decline rate went up, which was the actual goal I had failed to achieve by resolving to be firmer.

There are six or seven of these and they are all attached to something I found mildly unpleasant: chasing an invoice, asking for a deadline extension, telling someone their brief is not specific enough. In every case the friction was emotional rather than mechanical, and in every case a pre-written shape dissolved it. I do not fully understand why this works as well as it does. My best guess is that the unpleasant part is the composition — choosing the tone in the moment — and once that is decided, sending is easy.

The second non-obvious category is snippets that enforce a format. My meeting notes snippet expands to four headings, and because it takes one keystroke, I use it every time, which means every meeting note in three years has the same structure. That consistency is worth considerably more than the typing, because it makes them searchable and skimmable, and I could never achieve it by intending to.

The maintenance is essentially zero, which is the whole argument. This is the only automation category I have that does not break — there is no API, no permission, no schedule. Snippets have survived two laptop changes and one operating system migration. Over the same period every clever thing I built has needed attention at least once.

The practical advice, if you have not done this: do not sit down and write forty snippets. That produces a list of things you thought you would type and mostly will not. Instead, install the tool and then, for a month, add a snippet every time you notice you are typing something for the second time or hesitating over a message you have written before. Mine accumulated at roughly one a week and every one has earned its place, because the trigger for creating it was a real repetition.

The one piece of advice on triggers: prefix them all with a character you never type otherwise. Mine start with a semicolon. Without this you will eventually get an expansion in the middle of a real word at a bad moment, which happened to me in a client email in 2023 and is the reason I now mention it.