How do I start automating my work?
What is the most boring or tedious part of your job?
Tedium is the computer’s favorite thing to take care of for you. It also happens to be my favorite thing to delegate to the computer.
Some things are easy to figure out how to pass off to your technological friend, but it can also get pretty complicated depending on how comfortable you are with programs, shortcuts, and sometimes even code. I’ll try to keep things as accessible as possible without going into developer-mode (yet).
Now, let’s get into the good stuff. How do you start automating those brain-numbing tasks?
Step 1: Write down your process
The very first thing you need to do is become aware of those tedious tasks. It’s amazing how much we do that doesn’t need to be done manually, but since we do these things every day, we get into a rhythm and flow. We might even be really good at what we do, so we don’t realize that our 5-minute optimized manual process we’ve been working on for years is actually something the computer could take care of in seconds.
Take 10 minutes right now and write out what your day looks like in terms of tasks. For example, maybe the first 30 minutes of your work day looks like:
- Turn on computer, open Chrome and Photoshop
- Open company website and open a new tab, log in to task manager site
- Send response to a stakeholder through the task manager
- Close current task, open the next one
Step 2: Identify repetition
If you find yourself doing something that’s repetitive, note that in your process outline above. These can be recurring tasks like sending the same kind of response to multiple people, updating the info in multiple cells in a spreadsheet, renaming/moving files, checking a site for changes, etc.
Step 3: If only…
Throughout your day, whenever you catch yourself thinking something along the lines of, “If only I could do this,” put that thought into the process outline, and then “Google” it. Chances are there is a way to do whatever it is. The answer could be found with a quick Google search, inside a program’s user forums, with a keyboard shortcut, or a process change.
One of the best ways to eliminate wasted time or unnecessary effort is to get into the habit of immediately going to a browser with your “if only” thoughts. This may seem obvious, but I’ve gone years doing the same old things that take forever, only to finally go to Google and discover some way of decimating that task.
If you don’t find an answer within 5 minutes of searching, come back to it later when your subconscious has had a chance to think about it. You may realize a few days from now that you weren’t using the right keywords, you needed to break down the problem further, or you might think of a solution from something else you’ve seen before.
Now what?!
If you're looking to start automating, these steps should put you on a good path. Any good process, product, or change in general is best started with this "discovery" phase. We need to uncover the mindless, repetitive tasks in our process, consider our best-case scenario, look for potential pre-existing solutions, and finally, if we still haven't solved our problem, it's probably time to automate.
Now it's just the "how" that we need to work out...and that's hopefully what you'll find here on this site. Go finish your assignment from Step 1, and we'll catch you on the next article.