Say -- again for argument's sake -- you are fortunate enough to have good clients who hire you over and over. And each client has certain delivery specs -- in my case, how this print story is laid out for delivery.

Using the average office productivity suite, about the most efficient thing you can do to save time on every job -- and make more money -- is to do things like create a style sheet, save it as a master template and then manually import modifications such as job name, job number, date and other data. It usually takes a minute or two to set up a file each time. Not horrendous, but not cutting-edge efficient either.

Automator lets me combine all those steps -- opening the file and entering much of the information, saving the file, putting that file in the right directory -- into just a few simple clicks. So once I made an Automator script that created this TheStreet.com file, I did not need to hunt down the template on my computer to get started and then enter my information in that template.

For this job, and every job for this company from now on, when I start, all I must do is run an Automator script. And poof! I have the properly named file in the proper directory. And what was once 20 clicks is now two.

See the difference? Automator does all the heavy repetitive entering of similar bits of text, picking my way through my file directory and creating file names. I just have to enter the job's particulars and Automator does the rest.

Since Automator works on every bit of software running on this test iMac, essentially anything within the purview of the machine can be sequenced in a series of automatic steps. So say I need to match an invoice to a PowerPoint demo to one of my spreadsheets; I could just enter the new information -- say, client name and current date -- and Automator could do all the work.

How is that for a waaaaaay slick concept for the time-constrained small business arena.

But ... before you run up your Amex (AXP Quote) bill investing in all the Apple gear and software you need to get Automator working for you, realize there are major limitations.

First of all, as elegant as Automator is -- all these processes are controlled by a simple drag-and-drop graphically oriented environment that makes you feel like you are hardly programming a computer at all -- you are still programming a modern, powerful computer. And while not particularly hard, it takes time and patience. I found getting features functioning as I wanted them was challenging, in sort of a getting-a-triple-word-score-in-Scrabble kind of way. So those born without the geek gene may be scared off from this product.

And even more importantly, you are wrestling with a live computer program. One that does exactly what you tell it do. No more. No less. And one that can -- and will -- go horribly wrong unless you carefully, and I mean carefully, debug. So do not put business critical stuff into Automator scripts until you have a designated Automator expert on hand to keep you out of the techno-weeds.

Still, for the right operation, the gains possible with Automator are enormous. And it is this simple: Think of how slick it would be to get the boring, repetitive stuff that bogs you down all day out of the way.

And my read here is firm: Somebody, somewhere is going to make a lot of money with Automator. That person might as well be you.