Doing small tasks over and over again can really bog down your productivity. Luckily for you, Mac OS X comes with Automator, your own personal robotic assistant that will take care of whatever task you give it. You can tell it to rename a large group of files, have it resize a batch of photos to fit in your iPhoto slideshow, automatically create iCal events, and do other things that can simplify your workflow. And you don't need to know a thing about programming to control Automator�just drag and drop commands in the interface to create your own Automator Workflows. To give you an example of how it works, here's how we created a workflow in Automator to resize our most recent batch of iPhoto pictures for the web. To make your Mac do your dirty work, just drag any of the actions to the workflow pane.