When Homer Simpson was working from home, he found himself answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ DOS-prompts all day. Homer is not the type for careful consideration, so he opted to choose ‘yes’ every time. After a couple of days, he hesitated in a fit of celebration, only matched by a group of cheerleaders chanting, ‘Give me a Y, give me an…’ and before he had pressed the E-key, DOS had accepted his answer. Homer’s profound epiphany was this: He had tripled his productivity.

When you’re writing music, the last thing you want to think about is technology. You want the least amount of friction from thought to paper. Automating all the steps in between will get you closer to that, and in this series, I’ll show you how I’m implementing automation in various ways to write efficiently. Starting with this first post with a geek-level of 1, which means it only takes you a couple of tweaks inside Sibelius to shape up.