I have barely scraped the surface on Aflred but I find it very useful.
Alfred enables hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more.
Most commonly, I hit the Option key + spacebar to a spotlight like box that acts as a text launcher or triggers other actions. This is a huge area of improvement for me and I'm curious what others are using along these lines.
I used to use an open source tool like this called Quicksilver but have not checked to see if that project is up-to-date.
The pro venison of Alfred also has more automation thigns that you can do but I have not delved into this yet.