I hate to do things slowly. Ever since I can remember I've wanted to do things as quickly as possible. This probably has a lot to do with being involved in Speedcubing for the last decade where the goal is to always solve the cube as fast as possible.

Naturally, this extended into my work. I don't like to do repetitive tasks frequently. So if there is anything I can do to finish a task faster, I'm going to do it. One of my favorite tools for MacOS is Alfred. If you're familiar with Spotlight on MacOS, Alfred is the same thing but on steroids. People often ask why you would choose to use Alfred instead of Spotlight and I hope to talk about some of the very powerful things Alfred allows you to achieve and how it can help you speed up some preproduction video tasks.

As a disclaimer, many of the things I will mention in this blog post require the powerpack of Alfred which can be purchased for roughly $25. It is worth every penny, I promise! Alfred does also allow you to use the free version which still has many features that you can try out and see if you like Alfred.

At its core, Alfred is an application launcher. When you hit your keyboard shortcut to activate Alfred (mine is Command+space) a little window will pop up that you can type in. As you start to type, results that match what you have typed start to populate the window. If you open something frequently, Alfred will learn that you frequently open that and start to populate that result at the top of the list so you can open it quicker. You can see in the screenshot below that I very frequently open Premiere so when I only have to type "Pre" and Alfred knows that I want to open Premiere.