Putting it all together: A day in the life

Step One: Go to the mailbox. Collect all my incoming gold and expired glyphs. Because I only post for 24h whenever I post, I will often log in to about 20% of my auctions having expired. This is part of the overall process, it might be better if I posted for 48 hours, but I figure I'm saving a little gold, since I end up canceling around 70% of my auctions anyway.

Step Two: Go to the auctioneer, and do a smart-cancel on all my undercut auctions. It's better to do this now, before reposting my expired auctions (the glyphs are in my bags right now), since that way there's fewer auctions to scan.

Step Three: Post everything that's in my bags. This includes the previously-canceled auctions as well as any glyphs I have in my bag where my total inventory was previously above my post limit (I limit to 4 on the AH at once, but occasionally make more than that, so there are usually 10-20 glyphs waiting for buyers to take one of the posted ones).

Step Four: Back to the mailbox. Get all the canceled auctions. Using postal to get-all is nice, but this still usually takes 5-10 minutes (since you can get at most 50 mails per minute).

Step Five: Back to the auctioneer, repost all my canceled auctions. Lately, this has taken a repeat of steps four and five, as there are only 144 inventory slots in my character, and usually more glyphs than that to ferry from the mail to the AH. I strongly recommend getting at least 4 Packs of Endless Pockets for this reason.

Step Six: Once all the canceled auctions are reposted, do a status report on the market (using QA3). Any currently profitable glyph that I have absolutely none of gets queued up, and I will try to replenish the stocks of glyphs that I have less than 4 of on the market. The actual number of each that I make is kind of eyeballed, depending on how quickly I know the glyph sells. Death Knight glyphs sell like hotcakes, whereas Warlock glyphs sell like coldcakes.

Step Seven: Hearth to Dalaran. Run over to the inscription shop and buy whatever parchments and inks I need to fulfill my craft queue. I might need to take a side-trip to the bank to get more Ink of the Sea to trade in. As I said before, it is usually only a very minor price reduction if you can find the lower-level herbs for lower-level glyphs, if that- while people regularly farm icethorn, there's very few people farming wild steelbloom, so the prices run high. I just trade in inks of the sea.

Step Eight: Create all those glyphs you had queued. Ponder why Glyph of Eternal Water takes 8 seconds to craft whereas all the other glyphs take 3.

Step Nine: Port back to Ironforge (or whatever city you like the most). Post all these new glyphs. You might have to run /qa config and add all your glyphs to the Glyph category in QA3 - sometimes you're making a glyph to post for the first time (either you just researched it, or it was previously too cheap to bother with but now there's a market void).

Step Ten: Using AuctionLite, scan for Icethorn, Lichbloom, Adder's Tongue, Deadnettle, Goldclover, Talandra's Rose. Figure out which is the best deal (on my server, it's usually Adder's tongue, because at iLevel 77 it mills more like Icethorn than Goldclover, but because it's not used for much in alchemy it's pretty cheap, and I'm not sure my competitors know about how well it mills). Buy up as much as you think you might need. My goal is to have at least 2 days worth of ink in stock, in case there's a sudden spike. If I log in right after somebody else cleared out the cheap inks, I'll wait on this and do it the next day. If I log in and find a majillion icethorn listed at 80s per, I'll buy them all. Even if that means I end up with 2,000 inks when I'm through. I currently use about 250 inks a day, so they'll go away eventually.

Step Eleven: Get all the herbs from the bank, mill them, and turn them into ink. This is the most tedious and time-consuming part of the operation. To mill enough herbs for one day's worth of operations, I have to press the "mill" button about 500 times, every two seconds. My good friend fizzle pointed out a helpful macro, that's even better than using the Autodisenchant system provided my enchantrix:

/cast Milling
/use Icethorn
/use Lichbloom
/use Deadnettle
/use Goldclover
/use Adder's Tongue
/use Talandra's Rose

Bind that to a key, and keep whacking it (make sure autoloot is on). Read the internet or something while you press the button over and over. The only problem is that if you have leftover herbs (say, you have 2 spare icethorn), the macro will choke. Just put them in your bank and continue.

Step Eleven-a: Once a day, remember to do your research if you still need it.

Step Twelve: Do this once or twice a day, every day. Profit. Ponder what you're actually going to do with all that gold. Buy a motorcycle? Seems extravagant.