I think everybody would agree that they would love a little bit more time. You only need to look as far as some of the most popular self-help literature to see that everyone seems to be grasping for something that can free up your time; Atomic Habits, Think faster talk smarter and feel good productivity are just some examples that come to mind. So let's get to what you all supposedly are so keen to find out.
There are 3 pre-requisites to creating an automation that will take you from rubbing your eyes late at night staring at a blue screen. To sleeping peacefully knowing you have provided the robots employment.
1. Identify what roles/jobs in the business YOU are essential for.
This is recognising there are some aspects of your job where your personal voice, your opinions or your viewpoints are all essential to operation. This is things such as relationships with your employees or co-workers. E-mails to clients or even prioritising your own schedule should be things that you should acknowledge require your input to create meaningful value and impact.
2. Find your most time consuming, non-revenue generating job
This is about prioritising what to automate first. We want to find a job that is painful and creates friction every time you have to do it. But we also want to make sure this is not something that generates revenue. The reason for this is often revenue streams need to be updated or change to evolve with business climates, or the way you charge for items can change. For your first automation we want something simple that you can be sure won't change in the immediate future, but is also going to provide instant gratification as you will no longer need to bang your head against the desk doing a task that seems pointless.
Some example tasks could be:
- Copying rows from one spreadsheet to another
- Automatically uploading and sorting files
- Literally any calculation in a spreadsheet
- Turning off all the lights and locking the doors to the shop
Each of these tasks can be easily automated with little to no knowledge of automation and would save immense amounts of time. In my future guides I will break down how to implement these examples, but the true goal of these guides are to help you understand there are tools out there to help you overcome your specific problems and you can use them to instantly gain more time.
3. Lastly we need to consider the cost of automation
The above examples I have listed could be automated within a few minutes and that is why they are so great. For such a small investment of time you are getting really big returns. What we want to avoid is spending time automating tasks that will never return to us the time invested. [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1205/) has a fantastic comic that illustrates the frequency of the task vs the maximum amount of capital time you can spend before you stop saving time. A task that takes you one minute every month should not be nearly as important for you to automate as a task that takes you one hour every week.
Yes, yes I promised I would save you some time. So to make sure you leave with some value I want to introduce you to Claude.ai. I know! AI!? I hear you screaming at your computer screen. While you could go out and learn javascript to create simple google scripts or MBA's for your spreadsheets we are here to save time not to change our career paths to Junior software engineers. Think of one thing that drives you insane when you have to do it in your spreadsheet app of choice. For me it was copying clients tracking links into their personal spreadsheets for consolidation. Asking Claude "Write me a script that copies columns from my spreadsheet to a destination spreadsheet" solved that issue. After copying the script into google sheets and editing the data that Claude did not have access to I suddenly never had to do that task ever again. So I ask you to give it a shot. Go to Claude and request a Google script for Google sheets users or MBA for Excel users. You may be surprised with how much time you are about to save.