Automation can save you thousands of hours per year, dramatically increase productivity, and free you up to focus on what matters most to you. But where do you start? How do you know what you should automate?
First, Why Automate?
Look around you and you’ll see the benefits of automation everywhere.
From the clothing you wear to device you’re reading on to the buildings you live and work in, automation played a part in creating all of it!
Previously, automation was mostly focused on industry: on making physical things, but now automation plays a growing role in everything from marketing to healthcare.
The best automations don’t replace humans. They allow humans to focus on the things that matter most to them.
But just to get really specific, here are some automations my team and I use.
- Coaching Automation. We saved 180 hours per year and gave better advice by creating a coaching automation that checks in with people weekly and generates automatic one-on-one accountability emails using AI that our coach edits, personalizes, and sends.
- Lead-gen Assessment. We generated 10,000 leads with a 45-question assessment that tells writers what type of book they’re writing, training them in our unique writing process.
- No data entry ever. We have hundreds of thousands of rows of spreadsheet, but we’ve never done manual data entry on one of them.
- Cool calculators! We’ve made a couple of cool calculator tools to instruct and cast vision for our customers. More details on our post here.
- Home automation. But it’s not just work stuff. We’ve saved dozens of hours vacuuming, mopping, and turning off the lights with home automation tools.
But after building more than a hundred automations, you start to learn what’s worth automating and what’s not. After all, why spend a dozen hours building an automation that only saves you a couple of hours per year!
So how do you figure out what to automate and what to do the old fashioned manual way?
The Most Important Question to Ask BEFORE You Start Automating
Before you start automating though, there’s one all-important question you need to ask:
What do you want to NOT automate?
What’s so important to your team or company that you can’t trust it to a robot?
For example, maybe having face to face conversations with your customers is important to you.
Or spending time working on your design and creative.
Or hosting live events.
Whatever you care most about, whatever energizes you and your team, don’t automate that thing!
Instead, automate the busy work, the tedium, the things that must be done, sure, but aren’t exciting to you.
By starting there, it will determine what you build your automations around!
5 Questions to Decide What to Automate
There are five questions I think about when I’m choosing what automations will most improve my life.
- What tasks are most repetitive? If the task is performed consistently, with a clear and defined process, then it might be worth automating. You’d be surprised at what this includes though—everything from frequently asked customer service questions to cleaning your house! As long as there’s some kind of process, you can create an automation around it to make it easier.
- What tasks are error-prone or error-impossible? If your process is either susceptible to human mistakes or it so mission-critical that any error would have major consequences, then adding automation to provide failsafes can help! For example, did you know that a Michigan doctor implemented a simple 4-step checklist in hospitals that save 1,500 lives and 100,000+ infections in just 15 months? That’s a pretty good automation!
- Is your task data-intensive? If your task involves managing, transferring, or processing either large amounts of data (or smaller amounts repeatedly), an automation can help. Especially today with AI, you can process HUGE amounts of data very quickly. Say it with me, “No data entry EVER.”
- Is your task high-impact? Automating this process would save a significant amount of time, focus, or money, or it would improve outcomes enough to increase revenue, enhance customer service, etc.
- Do you hate your task? AUTOMATE IT! Seriously, there’s no reason you should do things you’re bad at or that you hate. Have a robot do it for goodness sakes, or at least simplify and automate it so you can spend as little time as possible doing it.
So how about you? As you think about those five questions, what comes to mind? What could YOU automate in your life? Leave a comment and let me know!
And what would it look like to do an automation audit for your business, your team, or your personal life? What if you went through your daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly tasks and got smart about what you should do manually and what you should automate.
Maybe we can help! Send us a note here or sign up for a call and let’s get started fighting tedium together.