Please place an extra button to one corner of a geologist/explorer (like there is now for hurry-complete with gems). The function of this button would be to instantly send the specialist on a mission. You would choose the mission manually and it would be stored in the game's memory. Of course you could change it at will. I always send my explorers on very long treasure searches, I always send my fully skilled geologist for gold search, and I always send the same group of geologists to find copper deposits with skills tailored for this purpose. It would be handy to send them with one click instead of assigning the one and the same task from the menu over and over again.
Since I have a small army of both specialists in my star menu, it gets tedious going through each specialist one by one, always opening the menu for each guy and assigning a mission to them just to send them on the exact same task every single time. For a geologist it's three clicks and for an explorer it's four clicks of the mouse to get them going. Every morning I send 15 explorers for extra-long treasure search, 3 explorers for long treasure search, 5 geologist for copper, 2 geologists for stone and 10 geologists for marble deposit searches. This takes 123 mouse clicks. Implementing the suggested "Favorite mission" button would cut it down to 35 mouse clicks in this scenario! The time consumed on this mundane morning routine would be cut back even more since a menu won't pop up for each specialist.
I know this is a "rich guy problem" and that I should just be grateful for having so many specialists. Having said that, most of them have been bought with gems so BB could add value for their customers' money and make the specialists smoother to use.