I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Figuring out what you can automate in your business
Hi Reader,
We all have repetitive things we do at work.
If you have a team, they’re certainly doing a lot of the same things on a daily, or weekly, basis as well.
On the surface, it may seem like repetitive tasks are just a part of the job. But you can automate many of the things you do regularly.
Even if you think you can’t automate a project entirely, there are likely repetitive tasks throughout you can automate to save you and your team time. This will free you up to focus on higher-level tasks.
To figure out what you can automate, start by breaking a project down:
- Take a task you suspect could be automated
- Write a detailed process for how to complete the task
- Review the steps to identify areas which involve repetition
Look for areas in your process where you do the same thing repeatedly. These could be things like:
- Moving or renaming files
- Adding items to a spreadsheet
- Sending welcome emails to new members
- Publishing a tweet for your latest podcast episode
Anything you do the same way again and again (or even a similar way with a variable or two changed), you can automate.
Once you know what you want to automate, there are a few different ways you can make it happen:
Automate with Zapier
If you don’t know how to code, but you want to connect multiple apps together, Zapier is a great no-code solution.
You can set one app to be the trigger so that when a certain thing happens, you can make another thing happen in a different app.
Some examples:
- When a new leads comes in through TypeForm, post a message in a Slack channel
- When a new podcast guest books on Calendly, create a shared document in Google Docs
- When a client signs a contract in Adobe Acrobat, create an invoice in Quickbooks
Automate with macros
While Zapier is great for connecting multiple apps together, sometimes you might have a repetitive set of tasks you need to complete on your local computer.
Maybe you have 100 attendees in a spreadsheet, and you need to paste their names into a new layer of your graphics editor one at a time. This is where a macro is helpful, because you can record all of those steps once and then play it as many times as you need.
Automator (built into macOS) can do this. Keyboard Maestro (macOS) is a paid app that can also do this and has some extra features. AutoHotKey (Windows) is another popular open source macro app that can do the same on PC.
Automate with code
While Zapier is pretty affordable when you consider the time you save, if you’re performing a lot of tasks at scale, it may eventually become more cost effective to code a custom solution.
Even if you don’t know how to code things yourself, it may still make sense at some point to hire a developer to build something custom if what you want to automate is key to your business.
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Google Docs Shortcut: Jump to cursor
Have you ever found yourself using a long Google Doc in a meeting and your colleague says, "Take a look at this right here," and you're not sure where "right here" is?
Instead of scrolling the document looking for their cursor or highlighted text, just click on their circle avatar at the top of the page.
You'll jump straight to their cursor. Do the same thing in Figma and you can follow someone else around the screen.
TWITTER THREAD
Astonishing projects that were accomplished in an incredibly short amount of time
Did you know Disneyland was built in just 1 year and a day?
Or that the original iPod shipped just 290 days after Tony Fadell was hired to create it?
If you'll look past the typo in the first tweet (the original iPod launched in 2001 not 2011), there's some really interesting projects in this list:
YOUTUBE
Guy digs underground tunnel from his house to his shed
This is the most impressive, ridiculous YouTube video I’ve ever seen.
Have a great week!
—Nathan
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
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