Working Towards a Do Less, Automate More Workflow ⭐

The other day, my wife emailed me and asked if I could send her a full-sized version of a map of a walk we had created for our book Eternal Spring. I create these maps in Affinity, and because I want them to look as much like Google Maps as possible--meaning, exactly like Google Maps minus all the extraneous locations and text--I use the same fonts that Google uses. (They're available for free on the web if you're curious.) I keep high-resolution original versions of these map files and other images we use, and the versions that go into the book are exported to be smaller. But Stephanie posts to our website and wanted to put the walk on there but with a higher-quality version of the map.

This request triggered two "oh, right" moments. The first was tied to the Internet connectivity problem we had this past month in Mexico, where I briefly wondered whether I had the original map files anywhere easily accessible (I did). And the second was related to a mini-project I'd been thinking about anyway but started actively working on because of that problem. Which is difficult to describe in an obvious word or phrase. I guess I think of it as a sort of go-bag for getting up and running on a new PC. Which, as a reviewer, I do all too often.

In short, I'm always looking to make my workflows more efficient, and the process I undergo when setting up a new PC (or a newly reset PC) is a key workflow. I can do other things while this is happening, and often do, but it's still a largely manual set of steps, and it takes some time and a bit of attention. I would like to optimize as much of this as possible, but I would also just like to finish it as quickly as possible. Because once this is done, I can simply move between several PCs, as I do all the time, and never worry that the laptop I pick up next is missing something.

Except, of course, this is me. And I always miss something. So even before the weird recent NAS issue, I had been thinking about simplifying this process as much as possible and eliminating the chance that I miss something as much as possible. It's fair to say that the NAS issue has only added a sense of urgency.

OK, so what does this look like?
The workflow
I have data that I sync to every PC. This is documents and other files that I am either working on actively or may need in the course of a typical day, and it's separate from archival data I also store--in multiple places--but will never sync. This is what I think of as my "current" work, and as I write this, it's a set of data across three or four folders that takes up about 15 GB on disk. This can be in any cloud storage service, though I'd been using Synology Drive until the issue noted above. Right now, I'm using Google Drive, but I could also use OneDrive, which, granted, has some appeal because it's built right into Windows 11.

I also have a set of apps that I install on every PC, and I automate that process with the Windows Package Manager (winget), a command-line...