Rinse, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat: Automation

Your computer is already really, really good at being automatic.

When your computer starts up, it does all sorts of things automatically - loads drivers, pulls up a user interface, checks the file system, initializes routines and subroutines, displays graphics, sometimes plays sound. Computers are really good at doing things automatically, and a huge part of using them effectively is to find ways of doing thing automatically.

For example:

Let's say you've been writing a long paper, and your realize that you've just been citing a book by famed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein - but you thought the book was by Rodgers and Hammerstein (him and his songwriting partner) so every citation that should read Hammerstein now reads Oscar and Hammerstein.

You could continue to test your tired eyes by reading through page after page of essay, straining your already tired eyes looking for each separate occurrence of "Rodgers and Hammerstein" and then figuring out if that particular occurrence is part of a citation. Or you could use the automated find and replace feature in most Office Suite software.

This functionality is usually opened by hitting Ctrl+F (on a Windows-based computer) and then clicking "Find and Replace" - many Office Suites now include extra finding tools, like "wildcard" characters, which may allow you to find all digits, so you could search for all occurrences of "(Rodgers and Hammerstein comma digit" where the comma and digit would tell you that the digits are page numbers, used in your MLA-style citations. This will make it almost certain that the only occurrences you find are part of citations. You can then tell the program to replace all of those with "(Hammerstein comma digit" - allowing you to preserve the number, eliminate Rodgers, and almost get to bed on time.

Ctrl+F is called a keyboard shortcut, and there are more about those in the next section.

Another example:

If you need another example of automation, here's one I do every week:

I could create flash cards or quizzes for my homework studies on my own, but many flashcards and quizzing sites like Quizzlet, Studyblue, and Flashcard Machine allow you to upload a spreadsheet in which one column is the question, and the other the answer. This saves me time from adding cards one page at a time - sometimes I only need to copy and paste (say from a list of words and definitions) into the spreadsheet, and then I upload, and I'm done.