Using Automator

Automator is an application in Mac OS X Tiger that allows you to automate repetitive tasks by combining a set of predefined actions into a sequence called a "workflow". Because the basic actions are all written for you, you don't need to be a programmer to use Automator. You just chain together the actions that you want performed, maybe customize a few settings, and you're done.

Life Balance includes Automator actions for finding tasks by name, creating new tasks, setting importance and place, updating the to-do list, and retrieving the top to-do items for a particular place. These actions can be combined with Automator actions provided by other applications to do things like turn an email into a Life Balance task, email someone your to-do list, or even read your to-do list out loud!

Learning More About Automator

This manual describes how Life Balance interacts with Automator, but to learn more about Automator itself you'll want to launch the program and choose Automator Help from the Help menu. The help includes a "getting started" tutorial, general instructions for working with actions and creating workflows, and advanced tips for integrating Automator and AppleScript.

Apple's web site also has dozens of free downloadable actions that extend Automator in various ways. To get there, choose “Mac OS X Software...” from the Apple menu, then click on All Downloads and then Automator Actions to see what's available.

Share your Life Balance workflows with other members of the Life Balance community. Get in touch and we'll post them as a resource on the Llamagraphics web site.

Running Automator Workflows

Once you have created an Automator workflow, you can run it by clicking on the Run button at the top right of the window. This is fine if you only need to run the workflow once, but if you have created a workflow that you will be running over and over, there are other more convenient ways to run the workflow.

One possibility is to save the workflow as an Application, which you can do using the "File format:" popup when saving your workflow. You can run a workflow application just like any other Macintosh application, which includes adding it to the Dock for easy access.

You can also place Automator workflows in the special folders used by the Script Menu, and then run them from the menu bar just like AppleScripts. See The Script Menu for more information on how to enable the Script Menu.

Catalog of Actions

Here's a list of the Automator actions that are built into Life Balance. If you have more than one document open in Life Balance, these actions only operate on the topmost document.

Note: Under Leopard, Automator actions are organized by category rather than by application. You can find the actions for Life Balance in the “Calendar” category in the Library.

Many of these actions return a list of Life Balance tasks. These tasks can either be used as input to other Life Balance actions that accept tasks as input, or they can be used as input to any other Automator action that accepts text input.

Find tasks

Finds all Life Balance tasks that have specified text in either their name or notes. You can specify the text, and whether you're trying to match the start, end, middle, or entire text of the name or note.

Get selected task

Returns the currently selected task in Life Balance. If nothing is selected, or if a place or appointment is selected, then this action returns nothing.

Top to-do list tasks

Returns the top N items from your to-do list, given a specified place and whether closed places should be included.

Note that this function does not update the to-do list, so you may want to precede this with an "Update to-do list" action.

Also, this action uses the currently open Life Balance document to provide you with a pull-down menu of places. You should open the intended Life Balance document before adding this action to your workflow, so that the correct choices will appear in the Place menu.

Update to-do list

Updates the Life Balance to-do list, just as if you had clicked on the Update button.

Note that this workflow action does not generate any results, it simply passes through whatever information is passed into it. This means that you can place it within an existing workflow without disturbing that workflow.

If you want to retrieve tasks from the updated to-do list, use the "Top to-do list tasks" action.

Create tasks

Creates new Life Balance subtasks under the task with the specified name. If there is no existing parent task with that name, then a new toplevel task will be created to hold the new subtasks.

This action accepts three kinds of input: text, email messages, and iCal events. Email messages will be converted to tasks that have the email subject for their name, and the body of the email in the notes. iCal events will be converted to a task with an associated appointment. (For two-way iCal synchronization, see Synchronizing with iCal).

Filter tasks

Takes a list of tasks as input, and returns only those tasks that are either complete, or incomplete (your option).

Get subtasks

Takes a list of parent tasks, and returns either their immediate subtasks, or all of the subtasks in that section of the outline. You can also choose whether the parent tasks themselves should be included in the final list.

Prefix task name

Takes a list of tasks, and changes the name of each task to include the specified text prefix (if it doesn't already start with that prefix).

This can be useful if you have two different Life Balance projects containing tasks with similar names. By giving the tasks in one project a distinctive prefix, it becomes easier to distinguish them in the to-do list.

Set importance

Takes a list of tasks, and sets the importance slider of each task to the specified value.

Be careful when preceeding this action with the "Get subtasks" action. Because Life Balance automatically combines the importance of parent and child tasks when computing overall priority, you usually don't want to set the importance of an entire outline section to anything other than "essential".

Set place

Takes a list of tasks, and sets the place of each task to the specified place.

Note that this action uses the currently open Life Balance document to provide you with a pull-down menu of places. You should open the intended Life Balance document before adding this action to your workflow, so that the correct choices will appear in the Place menu.