It had to happen. I’ve replaced my Timesvr assistants with a collection of Perl scripts. Delegation had been a good experiment, but I’d gotten frustrated by the number of duplicate calendar entries and the occasional library fine when people didn’t follow my instructions correctly, even with all the notes and clarifications I’d added. Also, my wake-up calls were no longer being done by happy, enthusiastic assistants, but by uncertain-sounding assistants who paused for approval all the time.

Being a resourceful programmer, I cancelled my monthly subscription and wrote code that did many of the routine tasks I’d asked them to do.

What worked well, and what can I improve?

• Delegating tasks to more skilled professionals whom I’d picked myself actually worked quite well. I dropped several people who didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped, including an illustrator who submitted tracings of other people’s photos instead of drawing something original.
  It was good to think about which tasks I could delegate and what steps were involved.
• Setting up one-time appointments worked well, but setting up recurring appointments was confusing because of Timesvr’s rotating pool of assistants. Next time, I’d probably go with having a single assistant if I want something like that.
• Being able to call in with a request was a useful substitute for having a mobile data plan and looking things up myself, but a data plan is faster. ;)

Delegation was a good experiment, but automation is even more fun. I find myself thinking in Perl rather than Ruby because Perl’s archive of modules (CPAN) is much, much bigger than Ruby’s, so practically everything I want to do can take advantage of an existing library. =)

A repetitive task is an excuse to learn more about automation tools. My text automation tool of choice is Emacs, a ridiculously programmable text editor. When it comes to numbers, I can do a lot with equations, pivot tables / data pilot, and judicious use of macros. For general automation on Windows, there’s AutoHotkey.

My threshold for automation is lower than most people’s. When faced with a repetitive task that will take me an afternoon to do, I’ll spend maybe half an hour understanding the task, an hour figuring out how to do it using the tools, and another half hour to an hour completing it with automation’s help. I spend the extra time learning more about the automation tools or sharing what I’ve done.

Even if the time savings are probably not going to be significant, if the task is sufficiently repetitive, I’ll go for the intellectual thrill of automating it. Bonus: if I have to do the task again (which occasionally happens), I have my process all ready to go.

What would it take for people to learn how to automate more things? How do I do it? How did I pick up this habit?

Part of it is knowing the capabilities of a tool. I know that I can simulate mouse clicks and keypresses, so when I catch myself repeating certain motions, I think about how I can automate that.

Part of it is being able to abstract the steps in a procedure. I can figure out what can be easily automated and what needs manual intervention. If I can automate 80% of something, that’s usually enough.

Part of it is being able to program and not being afraid of geeky interfaces.

Part of it is asking if the time-intensive parts of the procedure are really necessary. (Sometimes they’re not.)

I like automation. I wish more people were comfortable doing it.

Want to get started? The best way is probably to pick a tool depending on what you spend most of your time doing, learning lots about your tool, and doing little experiments. For Emacs, it might be learning how to use keyboard macros, then using Lisp. For Excel, learn different functions (I use CONCATENATE and IF a lot). For AutoHotkey, try using it for abbreviations, then expand.

Have fun and save time!