It’s no secret that I like to figure out ways to automate the work that I do. It’s valuable and, often, it can be even more effective.
A tool I just came across to do this in Windows is AutoIT. It’s completely free and very powerful.
In 3 hours, I was able to learn how to program it (which is easy if you have any programming experience…I’m a pretty bad programmer), then write a custom piece of code that will run certain reports and data gathering for me.
Previously, I had to do this by hand and could run about 6-10 of these a day at about 60-80% accuracy. This consumed approximately an hour a day.
Now, I’ll be running one every hour, constantly, totaling 24 run each day. Because of the nature of this report, this script takes a little extra time to run each report which will actually increase the accuracy and effectiveness to 95%-100%. In addition, since I don’t have to manage it, I gain an hour a day by not having to run this report manually. Considering that I usually run these 5 days a week, and now I can run them 7 days a week, I was producing about 40 of these reports a week, and I’ll now be producing 168 a week.
So, I’m able to produce this information at 400%+ higher rate that I produced before, at a 25%-60% greater accuracy, and I gain an hour a day to spend on other things. To say that I’ve quadrupled my productivity by doing this would be reasonable.
Considering that my time investment was about 3 hours of time, or three days of work with the previous method, my investment is recouped within 24 hours.
Automate your tasks. If you don’t know how to, make friends with the guy in the back office that no one talks to. Talk to him about the things that you do over, and over, and over, and over, and chances are that he has a solution. If he doesn’t, he’s likely to want to figure one out for you. “Those guys” thrive on solving problems. Just ask nicely, appreciate his help, and if he asks you to do something (like wait a few days for him to get back to you, or whatever), respect his request.
If you’re doing the same thing over and over. Stop it, and find another solution.