Things I Like: My macOS Start/Stop Work Shortcut

It's the little things, really...

When Apple released the Shortcuts app for the Mac (3 years after releasing it for their mobile OSes, the jerks [yes, I know we had Automator before that but Shortcuts fills, I think, a different niche]), I didn't have much use for it. My file operations are covered by Hazel automations that I've had forever, and I struggled to think of any use for Shortcuts.

I do my job from home, from my own computers. Yes, my workplace provides me a laptop, but I'm a dainty fancy lad, and I like to work on what I like to work on. I like nice kit, basically. After a years-long cold war with our IT folk, I convinced them I know how to operate securely and they stopped fighting me ages ago. So I can work from my nice stuff in my home office. Besides, I don't have room to setup a whole work-gear workstation here on top of my own shit, and my eyes start to burn at even the thought of working from a laptop screen for any length of time.

So, instead of just closing a work laptop when the day is done, I need to get that shit gone so I can go from the bad screen to the good screen. Opening and closing the same set of apps every day adds up. And I'm lazy. So I programmed a shortcut to simply open all the shit I need open to do my job, and a related one to shut all that shit down when I'm done.

It works great, and I really enjoy whacking the STOP WORK button on my desktop at the end of every workday. To the point that I might wire it to a hardware button just to eke a little extra pleasure out of it.

I've added a bunch of additional shit over time to Shortcuts, variables like "open these apps and fire up a VPN and put on DND for x apps; if I whack Stop Work but there's still any scripts executing or file transfers ongoing, give me an alarm about it before killing things; cleanly freeze and sleep any Windows VMs running, etc"... it is an increasingly rare example of something new from Apple on the software side Just Working Right.

I'm not doing 1/1000th of the Shortcuts shit a maniac like Frederico gets up to, but I enjoy my little collection of tools and automations. Always be learning new shit, I guess, is the lesson here.