2019-05-02
Computers are good at doing boring things. Humans are too, but humans are also good at doing other, more interesting and creative things.
In every job I’ve been at, there have always been loads of ways to save human time by telling a computer to do some stuff instead of doing it manually. This is especially true for non-super-technical areas; there could be lots of delicious low-hanging fruit.
You don’t even need to be able to code to do loads of stuff; services like IFTTT or Google sheets have lots of automatable functionality baked in.
In the past I’ve save loads of time by completely automating:
{{< figure src=“https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/is%5Fit%5Fworth%5Fthe%5Ftime%5F2x.png” >}}
The trick here is to pick your battles. Some tasks are easy to automate (those which involve structured data). Others are difficult. But always remember to keep tabs on where you spend your time; you may be able to free up a lot of time by some simple automation!