How much time have you saved with KM? šŸ•‘

Just a fun quick post. If you go click About Keyboard Maestro in the menu bar

It shows how much time KM saved you. This is of course an estimate but here is mine :

What does your look like? :slight_smile:

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I'll bite:

Estimate or not, I certainly feel like I've more than got my money's worth :smile:

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Holy shit. And here I thought I started to abuse Keyboard Maestro.

What do you mostly use Keyboard Maestro for? I am curious.

Most of my saved time probably comes from opening apps.

Well, as youā€™ve said, it is just an estimate, so I wouldnā€™t put too much stock in these numbers :slight_smile:

I use KM for all sorts of things, including but not limited to opening apps (though I donā€™t have anywhere near the intricate setup you do for that; I only have eight of my most commonly used ones mapped to āŒ„āŒ˜1ā€“8), formatting text, counting characters, remapping keyboard shortcuts (including canceling ones I never want to use, like Close Window in Messages), opening bookmarks and frequently visited websites, running AppleScripts, and generally just decreasing mental friction between how my Mac or any of its apps work out-of-the-box and how I want it/them to work. Itā€™s been one of my most valuable tools for years, and Iā€™m still learning new and powerful ways to use it (many of them thanks to this forum).

If you want a more specific answer, thereā€™s one macro in particular thatā€™s probably of no use to anyone but me, but makes one aspect of my job infinitely more palatable: a macro that takes the contents of the frontmost BBEdit window and transfers them to the currently selected cell in Excel (formerly by KM-based copying, app-switching, and pasting, now by a KM-triggered AppleScript). It may not sound like much, but itā€™s essential in letting me use my text editor of choice in place of an app that I only use for work reasons, and makes working in the latter so much better because of it. According to KMā€™s macro inspector, as of the time of this writing, Iā€™ve used this macro 13,597 times (not counting other variants Iā€™ve made over the years and keeping in mind the fact that KM only started tracking this information since version 7.0) and it alone has saved me an estimated 60 hours.

Anyway, I donā€™t know how helpful this has been, but hopefully I answered your question to your satisfaction :slight_smile:

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Yeah this is really interesting. I agree with you on how KM really brings the friction between new software and you down as you can customise any software to behave how you want it.

This is the first time I hear of KM's macro inspector but it is really awesome. Not surprisingly, this is my most used macro :

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Impressive! I donā€™t think I have any macros with use counts like that. Keep that up and Iā€™m sure youā€™ll pass my estimate in no time :smile:

I may be guilty of slightly over-using KM:

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You win! If anyone can top that by another exponential factor my mind will be well and truly blown.

This is super awesome! I have been using Keyboard Maestro for an year now. But, I keep moving between computers and had to reinstall multiple times. It shows 12 hours currently.

I disagree to believe this. :zipper_mouth_face:

Funnily enough I have had Keyboard Maestro for a year or two. Iā€™ve only saved ā€œ3 monthsā€ of time. Iā€™m not entirely certain how accurate that is either because most of the macros Iā€™ve made arenā€™t really ā€˜for saving timeā€™ but for having funā€¦ It would be interesting if there were ā€˜time savedā€™ stats for each macro you have madeā€¦

There is, they are shown in the Macro Inspector, and you can sort the macros by Time Saved.

Some of the actions are overly optimistic in what they say they will save, so I am often adjusting the calculated times of actions. Clearly the whole concept is more for fun than reality, though inevitably there is some level of truth in it.

Have you tried the Launchpad? Looks like it might help you.

Launchpad is not a fast as pressing a single hotkey. :slight_smile:

Ah right, that appears to be in KM7 :stuck_out_tongue: Need to upgrade I guessā€¦

I can assure you that the upgrade is well worth the small price. KM 7 brings a multitude of new, powerful features. See KM 7+ New Features. You pay only for major upgrades, like from any version to Ver 7. All of the 7.x updates are at no cost.

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I have to admit it does sound tempting. I only have version 5 I believe, so am missing out on a lot of features. However these days I barely even use my mac, and mac automation is not something I need often, if at all. Ever since I bought a windows PC I have been moving away from Mac just because of the flexibility windows allows when it comes to automation. My mac is only really used for entertainment purposes nowadays. Iā€™m still here on the forums though, mainly for the community and interesting conversations. :slight_smile:

8 posts were split to a new topic: Mac vs Windows Automation

Since we got into a very involved discussion about Mac and Windows automation, I have split all of those posts into a new topic:
See
###Mac vs Windows Automation

I have supposedly saved 25 months.

Intriguingly, the ten macros I have used most have saved me no time. These are mostly little parsing and text extraction tricks I need to support my main macros.

I use KM for a range of things, but I would guess most of the heavy lifting is done by a small group of macros that lift data from an incredibly unfriendly SaaS database and then generate batches of emails, report skeletons and updates.

I assume that KM is calculating the time save typing in this instance, although to be fair I run the macro on a fairly regular basis to refresh something and so it will often be doing a lot of work it has done just a few hours earlier :slight_smile:

Iā€™ve been running for it year; 760 times and it managed to save 19 months in that timeā€¦

Anyway, thatā€™s automation for you. Iā€™d sooner maltreat my system than my neurones.